 The Combined Air Emissions Reporting System (CAERS) is an electronic reporting application, developed by the E-Enterprise Combined Air Emissions Reporting (CAER) team, designed to allow facilities to report shared data to several programs with a single data submission. Programs with shared data include state, local, and tribal (SLT) reporting programs, the National Emissions Inventory (NEI), the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the Compliance and Emissions Data Reporting Interface (CEDRI), and the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP).
This spring, the team deployed CAERS Version 2 for the NEI 2020 reporting cycle. CAERS Version 2 is being used by more than 300 facility reporters in Georgia, the District of Columbia Department of Energy & Environment (DC DOEE), and the local authorities of Pima, Arizona and Lincoln-Lancaster, Nebraska. Shared toxics air data reported to CAERS Version 2 are also available for industry use in reporting air emissions to TRI. By using CAERS to collect NEI data electronically, DC DOEE is migrating its emissions inventory data collection process from paper forms to electronic reporting. In turn, this has modernized processes, saved time, reduced cost, and improved data quality.
CAERS is also bringing on four additional agencies: Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (recipient of the 2020 Exchange Network Grant), Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Arizona will work with EPA to integrate its own custom reporting system with CAERS by building modules allowing CAERS to request workflows between the systems. Work with the other SLTs will include expanding CAERS to allow for facility and inventory database transfers between CAERS and the SLT, as well as enhanced features and customization for SLTs via the creation of SLT modules.
Future CAERS work will also include designing and building out shared data workflows with CEDRI and GHGRP, adding CAERS functionalities to meet new NEI program requirements, refining the data that can be made available to TRI, and enabling data sharing between CEDRI and GHGRP.
For more information, see EPA’s CAER website and the E-Enterprise CAER website. |
