Sustainability

Focus areas

• Safe and equitable workplaces

  Prioritising the health, safety and wellbeing of our people and the communities in which we operate.

  ‘Live Safely’ is a core value that is reflected in everything we do. We strive to eliminate high consequence incidents and near misses that could result in serious injuries or fatalities.

  We continue to build a workplace that is diverse, equitable and inclusive. We value our people by helping them reach their full potential in an inclusive environment, where people feel valued, trusted, authentic and have high levels of psychological safety. 

  Our Inclusion and Diversity Strategy includes a focus on gender diversity, First Peoples engagement, flexible working conditions, cultural diversity, LGBTIQA+ inclusion and education and advocacy for people with a disability.

• Environmental and climate resilience

  Proactively reducing the environmental impact of our business while also building network resilience to the effects of climate change.

  Our businesses manage extensive infrastructure, both above and below ground, which is exposed to the effects of climate change. Forecasts for increasingly extreme weather conditions are influencing our approach to asset management, maintenance and construction.

  At the same time, we recognise our responsibility to protect the environment for future generations and reduce carbon emissions in line with state and national targets. We achieve this in three ways:

  • by supporting the increase of renewable energy generated and distributed
  • by reducing the direct and indirect carbon emissions from our business operations
  • by executing an internationally certified environmental management system that governs our activities.
• Empowering communities

  Enabling customer choices for generating, storing, using and selling energy to support the transition to a clean energy future.

  Customers and community are at the core of what we do. To best understand their needs, we continually improve our stakeholder engagement and embed the findings in our operations.

  This work is supported by our people being active in the communities where we live and work; from the city to regional and remote towns. 

  We capture stakeholder engagement within a broad range of operational planning. This includes major projects, asset maintenance, new energy solutions, regular customer experience interaction surveys, as well as our extensive regulatory processes. 

  This engagement seeks to listen to the needs, interests and preferences of stakeholders to support better decision making by our businesses. This relates to project planning, product and service development and customer communication.

  Importantly, the potential for bushfires to arise from our assets is ranked as our highest risk in our Enterprise Risk Management Register, due to the catastrophic impacts these events can have on people and communities. Therefore, it is a major focus of our attention, resources and investment.

• Responsible governance

  Sustaining our disciplined, risk-based approach to managing sustainability as part of our corporate governance and regulatory systems.

  A tiered governance system has been developed to oversee and manage our approach to Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) issues and actions. 

  This involves our Board, executive, senior management and operational personnel and utilises existing risk management, finance and procurement governance systems to ensure a high standard of compliance.