What Energy Data Does CSRD Require and How Do You Report It?

CSRD's ESRS E1 disclosure standard requires you to report total energy consumption broken down by source and by renewable versus non-renewable, plus energy intensity, your energy mix, and the Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions tied to that consumption. The practical challenge is rarely the reporting template — it is producing figures that are complete, granular and traceable enough to survive limited assurance when your data sits in meters, BMS systems, invoices and spreadsheets across multiple countries. This explainer covers what the standard asks for, why data quality decides how hard your first report is, and how to build a collection process that also serves EPBD and SECR.

What CSRD actually asks for on energy

CSRD is the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive; the detailed requirements live in the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and energy sits in ESRS E1 (Climate change). The energy-related disclosures you need to be able to populate include:

• Total energy consumption, in MWh, split by source (electricity, gas, fuels, district heating/cooling, self-generated).
• Renewable vs non-renewable split of that consumption, and the share of renewables in your total mix.
• Energy intensity — consumption normalised against a measure of activity or output, so it can be compared over time.
• Scope 1 and Scope 2 GHG emissions derived from your direct fuel use and purchased energy, plus material Scope 3 categories where relevant to your value chain.
• Consumption and production where you generate your own energy (for example on-site solar), since self-generated and self-consumed energy is treated differently from purchased energy.

Two things follow from this. First, you need consumption data at source level, not a single blended total — a portfolio-wide kWh figure cannot be split into renewable and non-renewable or converted into Scope 1 and 2 without it. Second, you need the same underlying data to reconcile against your emissions figures, because assurance teams will test whether the energy numbers and the emissions numbers tell a consistent story.

Why granularity, completeness and audit trail decide your effort

The reporting format is the easy part. The work is in the data layer beneath it, and three properties determine whether your first CSRD cycle is a few weeks of consolidation or a year of reconstruction.

Granularity. Monthly invoice totals are enough to state an annual figure, but they cannot support intensity metrics, renewable share, or the anomaly checks that explain an unusual year. Interval or near-real-time data — Wia's platform describes monitoring electricity, gas and water "down to one-minute data" — lets you attribute consumption to the right period, site and source, and defend it.

Completeness. A portfolio report is only as good as its weakest site. Missing meters, unmetered fuels, tenanted areas where you don't control the supply, and sites in countries with different utility structures are the usual gaps. You need a documented method for estimating or excluding anything you cannot measure directly, and that method has to be consistent year to year.

Audit trail. Limited assurance means an independent party checks your figures against evidence. Every number in the report should trace back to a source record — a meter reading, a BMS export, an invoice — with a clear path from raw data to reported value. If your process is "the regional manager emailed a spreadsheet," you have no trail.

Wia's framing of the problem is useful here: it describes ingesting "every meter, every source, every country" and outputting "reporting-grade data for CSRD, EPBD and SECR." The phrase reporting-grade is the operative one — the distinction between data you can look at and data you can attest to.

Where the data comes from, and why it's fragmented

In a large portfolio, energy data arrives from at least four kinds of source, and each has different reliability characteristics:

Retrofit metering matters because most existing buildings were not built with the sub-metering CSRD reporting rewards. Wia describes fitting sensors "by site staff or a local electrician on live meters, with zero downtime" — the point being that you can add measurement to an occupied building without shutting systems down. If you are weighing whether that investment is necessary, the test is simple: can you currently split consumption by source and by renewable share for every site in scope? If not, you need either more metering or a documented estimation method.

Aligning CSRD with EPBD and SECR

The reason to build one data layer rather than three reporting processes is that the underlying energy data overlaps heavily across frameworks.

• CSRD / ESRS E1 wants consumption by source, renewable share, intensity and the associated emissions.
• EPBD (the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive) is concerned with building energy performance — consumption and characteristics at building level.
• SECR (Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting, UK) requires energy use and associated emissions, with an intensity ratio, for qualifying UK organisations.

The same meter and invoice data feeds all three. What differs is the boundary, the normalisation and the disclosure format. If you collect once at the most granular level your sites allow, and tag each data point with the attributes each framework needs (site, country, source, renewable flag, period), you avoid re-collecting for each report. Wia's platform positions this as a single intelligence layer with reporting outputs for CSRD, EPBD and SECR, plus a "direct push to the ESG platform your team already uses" — the practical benefit being that your ESG team's system of record receives consistent data rather than a fresh reconciliation each cycle.

Practical steps from fragmented data to a CSRD-ready report

1. Define your reporting boundary. Which entities, sites and countries are in scope for the reporting year? Write this down before collecting anything, because it determines what "complete" means.
2. Inventory every data source per site. List meters, BMS points, invoices and any manual sources. Note the granularity and the responsible person for each. This inventory becomes your completeness checklist.
3. Close the metering gaps or document the estimates. For anything you cannot measure, record the estimation method and apply it consistently. Undocumented estimates are the most common assurance finding.
4. Ingest into one layer with consistent tagging. Every record should carry site, country, energy source, renewable flag and period. This is what makes source-level splits and intensity metrics possible without manual rework.
5. Reconcile consumption against invoices and emissions. Check that your metered totals and your billed totals agree within a stated tolerance, and that your emissions figures derive from the same consumption data.
6. Produce the ESRS E1 disclosures from that layer, and reuse the same data for EPBD and SECR outputs rather than rebuilding.
7. Keep the trail. Retain source records and the transformation steps so an assurer can follow any reported figure back to evidence.

Common sticking points

• Treating the report as the project. The disclosure is the output; the data layer is the work. Teams that start with the template usually end up rebuilding.
• Assuming invoices are enough. They cover cost and total consumption but rarely give you the source split, renewable share or interval detail the standard rewards.
• Inconsistent boundaries across frameworks. If CSRD, EPBD and SECR scopes differ, document why — don't let the difference look like an error.
• No owner per data source. Fragmented data stays fragmented until someone is accountable for each feed.
• Leaving assurance to the end. Limited assurance is easier when the audit trail is a by-product of collection, not a reconstruction exercise.

If your portfolio spans multiple countries and utility structures, the deciding factor is usually whether you can get every source into one tagged, traceable layer. Where you can, CSRD reporting becomes a query against data you already trust; where you can't, it becomes a manual reconciliation you repeat every year.