Scope 2 Without Your Own Meter: Concessions and Shared Space

Scope 2 reporting is straightforward for sites where you hold the electricity account, and it gets harder everywhere you do not. A concession inside a department store, a shopfront in a shopping centre, or a share of a third-party warehouse are all cases where someone else holds the meter and no bill arrives in your name, and the emissions are still yours to report. The task in those situations is to work out which sites fall inside your boundary, estimate their electricity when you cannot meter it directly, and document the basis well enough for an assurer to accept it. This guide covers the control boundary that decides what is yours, the ways to estimate electricity you do not meter, the particular difficulty of variable third-party space, and how to keep the assumptions defensible.

Start with the boundary

Before you chase a single kilowatt-hour, decide what's inside your inventory. The GHG Protocol gives you two ways to draw the organisational boundary: operational control and financial control. Retailers usually choose operational control, which means you account for the sites you run, whether or not you own the meter. That's the key point for concessions: if you operate the store, its electricity is your Scope 2 even though the landlord's name is on the bill. Set this choice once, at the start, because it decides which concessions, franchises and shared arrangements fall in or out. It's the same consolidated logic that decides who's caught by ASRS in the first place.

When you don't hold the meter

Once a site is inside your boundary but you can't get a bill for it, the number becomes an estimate rather than a reading. That's normal, and it's most of the work in a retail footprint. The task is to pick an allocation basis that is reasonable and that you can evidence, then apply the right grid factor. The aim is a defensible estimate you can explain, since a meter-perfect figure was never available for a site whose bill you do not hold.

The hardest case: variable 3PL space

Shared third-party logistics space is the one that breaks a tidy method. The floor area you occupy in a 3PL warehouse changes month to month with your stock levels: more space in peak season, less in the quiet months. A single fixed allocation misstates it either way. The fix is to tie the estimate to a driver that moves with your usage, such as pallet positions, storage volume or a monthly occupancy figure from the provider, and to apply it period by period rather than once a year. Document the driver, because this is exactly the kind of assumption an assurer will probe.

Keep it defensible

Three things keep estimated Scope 2 through assurance. Report location-based as your minimum, using the state grid factor for each site, since that's what AASB S2 requires. Be consistent: use the same allocation approach across similar sites, so two comparable concessions aren't estimated two different ways. And document the basis for each one, the driver, the source of the number, and the factor applied, so the figure traces back the same way a metered one would. An estimate that rests on a clear basis will pass, and the figure that fails is the one nobody can reconstruct, which is the same standard any figure faces under assurance.