How to get utilities for your ESG report

Introduction: Your ESG Journey Begins with the Meter

Most businesses think ESG reporting is complicated—and they’re not wrong. But here’s the good news: one of the most impactful (and often overlooked) parts of an ESG report is data you already have. We're talking about your utility data—the electricity you use, the water you consume, the heating bills you pay.

Utility data is the low-hanging fruit of ESG reporting. It’s quantifiable, available, and directly tied to your environmental impact. In this article, we’ll break down how to collect utility data, what to do with it, and share real-world examples of small businesses getting it right.

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What Utility Data Means in ESG Reporting

Environmental Impact at Its Core

When ESG is broken into its three parts—Environmental, Social, and Governance—the E often feels the most overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. Your utility bills are a direct reflection of your company’s environmental footprint:

• Electricity consumption is directly tied to how much “power” you are using to operate your business, and there are hundreds of ways you can influence this number. It gets more fun if you gamify it, to get people on board, but very often, this is a great place to start.
• Water usage is another fun metric to track. How many in your company do you think would be able to give you an accurate answer of roughly how much water you are using? I am assuming very few.
• Heating and fuel becomes more predominant in business that has physical production. In most companies that just operate with an office and not much else, this is easy to track but hard to do much about unless you are willing to invest in renovations or wear more clothes to the office.

These sources of data provide the backbone for most environmental indicators in an ESG report, and broadly cover both scope 1 and scope 2..

Step-by-Step: How to Collect Utility Data for Your ESG Report

Let's start from the beginning. You have just been tasked with making your first ESG report (yay!) and you want to start by getting your utility usage right. Let’s first talk about what your hopes are vs. what you will most likely get.

What we see often with smaller companies, is that the data you can get on utilities are incomplete or not the quality you had hoped for. Maybe you dreamt of someone sending you a PDF where is says how much water you used during the past 12 months in M3. What you got was a overview for the entire building where you only rent 30% and the water usage only covers April 30th 2024 to May 1st 2025. What do you do when data in incomplete, and you didnt get what you were hoping for? 

In the below, we outline how you deal with incomplete data, and what to ask for when you reach out to your landlord, your utility provider or your company administrator.

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1. Figure out who has the data you’re looking for

First things first. You need to figure out who holds the keys to the data you need. If you are renting office spaces, it will be your office manager. If you own the property, you will have utility providers most likely interacting directly with someone in the company. And if you are just renting a desk, an office manager might be able to help you out. As a rule of thumb;

• If you lease “desks” in a shared office = Office Manager will know where to go.
• If you own the property = Administrator or Finance will know where to go.
• If you lease an entire building, floor or office = Leasing company will know where to go.

Once you have figure out who has access to the data you need, you are ready to approach them.

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2. Request Data

When you reach out, you will want to be specific about exactly what you want. Otherwise, you might be looking into a long and very confusing string of emails, and most likely annoying someone in the process. To help you out, we have drafted a few email templates;

Requesting electricity, water & heating

Hi [name of provider]

We are currently preparing our annual ESG report and would like to request consumption data for our offices – including our tenancy at your property located at [address of property / office].

We are looking for the following data:

• Water consumption in m³
• Heating consumption in kWh
• Electricity consumption in kWh

Could you please provide a specification of [company names]’s consumption for the period [start date - end date]?

We would appreciate it if you could provide the information by [date].

Thank you in advance.

[Your name]

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If the information is coming from different providers, please adjust the email to cover only the utility you are looking for. Sometimes you will get lucky, and get just the data you need for your report. But very often, the data you actually get will be incomplete. When that happens, take a look at our 3rd point below.

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3. What to do when the data is incomplete

In an ideal world, you will get just the data you need for your report. In the real world though, it is highly unlikely. Very often, the electricity data, is in fairly good condition, and you can get the data in decent quality. For water and heating, the story is often different. Below are the most common errors you will face, when trying to collect the correct data.

Problem #1: “We don't have the data ready for that period”

When you reach out, you will in many cases be met with a “We dont have the data ready for that period yet, but can provide you with data for the previous period. This is highly likely to happe for Water for example, where the data you want, is water consumption in M3 for the period between January 1st 2025 and December 31st 2025. 

What they can give you, is water usage from April 2024 to May 2025.

Solution: think of utility collection as appropriation, and ask yourself “Do i believe that our water consumption is the same for 2025 as it was for 2024?”. Things that will play into this could be; did we move offices? Did we expand? Did we get more people? Did we use a lot for water for something?

If you can get the data for a previous period, and there has been no major changes that would effect your water usage (other than maybe more people), then what you need to do is calculate the water usage pr. Full time employee for the previous period, and then just multiply that by the number of employees you have for the period you are drafting the ESG report for.

Just remember: you need to add this as a comment in your ESG report to be transparent about how you found the specific data!

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Problem #2: “I can only give you data for the entire building”

If you are leasing an office or a seat in a building, water, heating and electricity will rarely be specified on an office level. You will be able to get the total utility usage, but to get the amount that you have used yourself, you will need to do a little math.

Solution: you will need to figure out how much you have used approximately, based on the usage of the entire building. To do that, you need to figure out a measurement. It can be number of desks, number of full time employees, number of square meters (m2) or other metrics that you can use to distribute the electricity, water and heating consumption. Very often, if you are renting an office, this will be amount of seats that you take up, or the amount of full time employees using the office. You will be able to get the total electricity, heating and water for the building, figure out how many people are there in total, and just divide the amount of people that you are, with the entirety. 

Once you have that, you can figure out your share of total usage, and use that in your report.

Just remember: you need to add this as a comment in your ESG report to be transparent about how you found the specific data!

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Problem #3: “I don’t have your usage, just how much money you spent”

Often, you will be met with the above problem. Luckily there is a fairly simple solution for this problem. Ideally, you want superb data as the foundation for your ESG report. But the world doesn’t work like that. If you can get how many kWh you have used of electricity, or how many m3 of water you have used, you can always use a spend based model for your calculations.

Solution: the spend based model, is essentially that instead of usage, you leverage money spend at a baseline for calculating your environmental impact. That means for every 100 EUR spent on electricity or water, you will have local emissions factors that you multiply with. The calculation would look something like; number of EUR spent on water x local emission factors for water = CO2 emission and in some cases, estimated water usage.

Just remember: you need to add this as a comment in your ESG report to be transparent about how you found the specific data!

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You will be able to find hundreds of other problems and if you want help, feel free to reach out to us in Wardn - we are always happy to help!

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4. How to calculate the data

Assuming you have successfully obtained some form of data, you are now ready to calculate that data into something that you can use in your ESG report. For most of the data points, you will need both the raw consumption - as in, the amount of mWh electricity and heating, the amount of water in m3 etc. but you will also need associated data. For electricity, this is for example, how big a portion of your electricity is coming from renewable sources, and for water, you might need to report on whether this is coming from areas with high water stress.

If your highschool physics seems a little far away, the easiest way to get the correct units for your report, is to ask ChatGPT (or similar) for the calculations. Ideally, you will want to include the following units in your report;

• For water = m3
• For electricity = mWh
• For heating = mWh

You can read more about how you register electricity usage in our article on utility registration for electricity.

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Getting utility data in the future

Once you have the right sources for your data, they will rarely change, unless you change location or start purchasing from a new provider. This means that if you get the process right in year 1, the following years are going to be significantly easier. To make your future reports better, we suggest that you;

• Document the process
• Document who to ask for what
• Write down your assumptions and methods of calculation
• Make sure you follow the conversation, if anyone talks about switching providers

Getting utility data can take anywhere from a few minutes to months. It all comes down to how easy your counterpart 

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Why your utility data matters beyond the report

There is a lot of talk about how ESG can create operational efficiencies. If you dumb that down, and focus mainly on CO2 emissions and utilities, this makes a lot of sense. For many, making an ESG report, will be one of the first times you really take a deep dive in your companies spend - both monetary spend, but also how much the company actually uses when it comes to utilities and CO2. Once you start looking at what it under the rug, you very often find things that should be cut away, or that is not supposed to be there.

The same thing will happen with ESG, and this in turn results in a significant decrease in usage and spend.

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Conclusion: Utility Data Is Where Your ESG Efforts Become Real

If ESG reporting still feels like a black box, your utility data is the flashlight. It’s the most tangible, trackable, and frankly—doable—starting point in your sustainability journey. And yes, sometimes the data will be messy, incomplete, or just plain weird. But that’s part of the game. The good news? With the right approach, smart assumptions, and a little back-of-the-envelope math, you can turn even imperfect utility data into credible ESG inputs.

More importantly, once you’ve done it once, it gets easier. You’ll know who to ask, what to ask for, and how to calculate it. That’s real progress.

And here’s the kicker: the act of digging into your utility data often uncovers inefficiencies that have flown under the radar for years. Meaning this isn’t just about reporting. It’s about running a sharper, leaner, more responsible business.

So don’t wait for perfect data. Start with what you’ve got, build on it year by year, and remember: transparency beats perfection every time.

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Need help getting your utility data in shape?
Book a virtual coffee with Anders, our CEO – no strings attached.

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