Background
GenOn is one of the largest independent power producers in the United States, delivering electricity to wholesale customers primarily in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. In mid-2017, GenOn entered into bankruptcy proceedings and began the process of reorganization and divestiture from its parent company, NRG Energy. As a result of the restructuring, GenOn was no longer able to utilize NRG’s enterprise support functions, including environmental services.
Without corporate staff support, GenOn would not have sufficient resources to meet its environmental regulatory responsibilities. The company needed an external partner to efficiently and cost-effectively replace the corporate-level services previously performed by more than 30 people.
GenOn selected ERM to be its alliance partner, responsible for overseeing environmental services for all company assets across eight US states. A key factor in ERM’s selection was our ability to leverage technology, allowing GenOn managers to exercise more efficient decision-making. As a result, our team ensured regulatory compliance while improving efficiency and lowering costs. GenOn saw an immediate cost reduction of over 50 percent in the first year, with an estimated seven figure annual savings.
Our Approach
We oversee a variety of programs for GenOn, including programmatic reporting and permitting, quarterly regulatory updates and running of the environmental management system. Our approach is to use more junior-level ERM employees as day-to-day points of contact while leveraging ERM’s more senior subject matter experts, as needed, for specific permitting and compliance needs. This blend of ERM employees provides GenOn with the best of both worlds: senior experts for the complex issues and cost-effective resources for more routine work.
In order to allow for the quick and efficient review of compliance management across sites, ERM developed highly interactive and informative dashboards integrated into the environmental management system. This enables facility personnel and GenOn management to view all compliance tasks by facility, responsible person, media, time period and other parameters. The environmental management team, as well as facility personnel, can review thousands of compliance tasks across the fleet in minutes versus the previous system, which relied on summary reports and facility reviews.
Benefits and Value
This multi-disciplinary, multi-year program is allowing GenOn to focus on its core business by leveraging our core business: great environmental, health and safety expertise that delivers value for our clients.
