Environmental compliance
Essential Energy’s Environmental Management System (EMS) is used to identify the environmental impact of our business activities, ensure compliance with environmental policies and procedures, and improve performance. The EMS applies across our operations and is certified to the international standard ISO14001.
We record and report environmental incidents in accordance with our EMS. Incident severity is categorised using an Incident Classification Rating (ICR), with category one being the highest severity and category five the lowest. Ratings reflect the overall significance of the incident across environmental, people and property impacts. They enable the consistent classification of safety and environmental incidents based on Essential Energy and external regulatory requirements.
There were 448 environmental incidents during 2023-24, of which 446 were either minor in nature (category four or less), near misses or incidents where classification was not required.
| INCIDENT CLASSIFICATION | NUMBER OF INCIDENTS 2022-23 | NUMBER OF INCIDENTS 2023-24 |
|---|---|---|
| Category 1 (high) | 0 | 0 |
| Category 2 | 10 | 1 |
| Category 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Category 4 | 17 | 14 |
| Category 5 (low) | 457 | 428 |
| Not applicable | 3 | 4 |
| Total | 488 | 448 |
One category two incident occurred, involving an oil spill near a stormwater drain, caused by a pole failure. A swift response prevented environmental damage. A category three incident also involved an oil spill from a pad-mounted transformer and was likely caused by a third-party impact on the transformer. Remedial action for oil spills includes replacing impacted soil with clean soil.
During 2023-24, we completed the final year of our Contaminated Land Management (CLM) program to investigate and remediate priority sites with a higher risk of potential contamination.
We completed five detailed site investigations (DSIs), supplementary investigations at two sites and remediation activities at one site during the year. This concluded the 12-year CLM program, which involved a total of 120 DSIs and remediation activities at 24 sites.
We also upgraded our online chemical management system, introducing enhancements in areas such as inventory management, reporting and security.
Risk profile reviews were completed for 160 of the higher risk chemicals listed in our chemical register, informed by the latest product safety information and our corporate risk matrix.
Over the past year we continued our partnership with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service by making a co-contribution of $4,000 to ongoing rainforest restoration activities on Susan Island. Starting in 2020, this partnership is delivering important biodiversity outcomes and protecting remnant island rainforest communities.