ISO 14001 National Grid has a long history of protecting the environment. As our environmental programs have matured over the past several decades, so has our environmental management system (EMS). Over the past several years we made the decision to adopt the International Standard for environmental management systems, ISO 14001, and implement our EMS along the guidelines specified in ISO 14001. We believe that this will help us manage our impacts to the environment better and will facilitate the continual improvement of our EMS.

We have made significant progress not only in meeting the ISO 14001 Standard, but also improving our EMS, including;

• identifying our impacts to the environment,
• preparing procedures to minimize those impacts,
• documenting our EMS in our EMS Manual,
• training operations employees in these procedures and
• developing programs and objectives to continually enhance our environmental performance.

These efforts have resulted in the following achievements:

• National Grid's Investment Recovery operation was registered to ISO 14001 in 1999;
• National Grid's Transmission System EMS was registered to ISO 14001 in 2001. New York Transmission was added in 2003;
• The New England Distribution System EMS was registered to ISO 14001 in November 2003; and
• The New York Distribution System EMS was registered to ISO 14001 in January 2004.

The Transmission, New England and New York Electric Distribution, and Gas Distribution ISO 14001 registered EMSs were later combined into one EMS for National Grid in the US. We have subsequently added other organizations to the registered EMS, including our Shared Services organization and the legacy Keyspan Gas operations in New York and New England.

Links noted by "(pdf)" are in PDF format and support Adobe Acrobat 5.0 and later. Download Adobe Reader, free software to view and print PDF files.