Shawan Gillians, Director of Sustainability and Associate General Counsel, and Robby Borden, Administrator of Sustainability, talk about what sustainability means at Santee Cooper.
What does sustainability at Santee Cooper mean to your team?
For us, sustainability is about two things: ensuring we are best positioned to meet the current and future needs of our customers, and ensuring we carry out our mission to be the leading resource for improving quality of life for all South Carolinians in a way that is mindful of the impact we have in our communities. Something we’re working on is helping our teammates and other stakeholders appreciate that sustainability is about more than environmental work. Sustainability is not one size fits all, and it requires a continuous listening and learning approach to be effective.
One of William Thomson’s, Lord Kelvin’s, famous sayings is, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Having the right data is essential to developing the right strategies to ensure our stakeholders’ needs are met. We have an obligation to our customers and our communities to measure, listen and learn, so we know how we are performing today to achieve the expectations of tomorrow.
How have you brought a continuous listening and learning approach to Santee Cooper’s Sustainability Program?
We’ve spent the last year with teammates in other departments on a listening and learning tour of industrial customers to better understand how we can help them with their sustainability goals. We’ve also been able to put our just transition team together for the closure of Winyah Generating Station, engaging with stakeholders in the Georgetown community as well as the environmentalist community to get their thoughts on how a just transition should occur. Finally, we’ve been working with our teammates throughout the company to understand the way they utilize data as we integrate the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards into our 2023 Annual Sustainability Report. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but it has been a busy year to say the least.
How has Santee Cooper’s Sustainability Program evolved over the past five years?
Although we didn’t have a formally recognized sustainability program until 2023, Santee Cooper has always found ways to embed sustainability within our company culture and ensure our stakeholders’ needs were met. With the creation of the Sustainability Department and hiring of our team, Santee Cooper has become more intentional about our sustainability efforts, including everything from what we measure and how we measure it to how we prioritize our sustainability objectives, and we’re just getting started.
What are the next steps for the Sustainability Program?
The next steps for sustainability at Santee Cooper include continuing our work with stakeholders to identify the areas with the most significant impact on our success moving forward and folding what we learn into short- and long-term strategies that are implementable by the company. Basically, we want to know what issues are most important to our internal and external stakeholders and check them for alignment with our objectives and priorities. Through sustainability reporting and open discussions, we want to learn how our employees and community perceive how we are doing today and ensure we best position ourselves to meet the expectations for tomorrow.