Energy, digital and the levers of sustainability 

Energy from emergency to pillar of a new sustainable economic future. This is how Europe is being challenged on this issue in a year that has seen a war erupt on its territory and a major energy crisis, while countries were still counting the damage of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The future of industry has to be built in Europe with digital and its basic materials, which include microprocessors and minerals: today we need more than gas and fossil fuels, said Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, in her recent State of the Union discours. “Whether chips for virtual reality or cells for solar panels, the twin transitions will be powered by primary materials,” von der Leyen said. “Lithium and rare soils are already replacing gas and oil at the core of our economy. By 2030, our demand for rare soils will be five times bigger. And this is a good sign, because it shows that our European Green Deal is moving fast.”

Just in the aftermath of the explosion of the Covid emergency, the research ‘Towards a net zero society. Digital technologies and strategies for a zero-emission world‘, carried out in 2021 by Atos Italia and The European House – Ambrosetti, quantified the impact of digitalisation in the effort towards a sustainable restart and concluded that digitalisation could contribute to more than 50 % of Italy’s decarbonisation and climate neutrality path between now and 2050. To achieve this goal, 20 strategic, accelerating or enabling digital levers will have to be activated, including Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud and High Performance Computing, Digital twin and Digital Platforms, in favour of the eight sectors of the Italian economy today most involved in energy consumption and the generation of polluting emissions. These include transport, electricity companies, manufacturing, services and waste. By 2050, digital energy will contribute, directly and indirectly, for 53.2% to the reduction of polluting emissions.

Energy and its role in the twin transitions (digital and ecological) will be right at the heart of the third iWeek. The Mediterranean as an alternative source for gas extraction, the energy independence and diversification of European countries, renewable sources, decarbonisation targets and resource weaponization are some of the economic and geopolitical topics on the agenda. Green technologies, today dependent on rare soils from China, and on microchips from Taiwan and Asia – issues on which the European Commission, as we have seen, is already working – assume a prominent position within the debate. Green tech (or cleantech) refers to solutions that use technology and science to create products and services with a lower environmental impact because they reduce the consumption of resources and the generation of waste and pollution.

Another topic that will be discussed during iWeek is the digitalisation of energy grids, which not only reduces costs and waste, but also makes it possible to manage energy flows smartly (Smart Grid) thanks to storage systems and the analysis of consumption trend data: during peak hours, electricity grids send energy to users, when demand drops, energy can return from users to the grid. This is where the topic of cybersecurity comes in: cyber defences are needed wherever there are connected devices.

The first two iWeeks editions took place in May 2021 and January 2022 respectively, gathering a total of more than 3,600 participants with their focus on topical issues such as cyber security, cognitive technologies and digital, energy and intelligence transitions.

Utility are becoming even more digital

Digitalisation also directly helps stop ‘high bills’ by innovating the practices of electricity companies. Technologies such as Cloud, IoT and AI, for example, are key to minimising issues along the grid and alleviating costs for end users. Machine learning algorithms, for example, allow for estimating future energy consumption and improving demand-based pricing models, as well as predicting peak loads and introducing incentives to balance demand and avert disruptions. Furthermore, continuous monitoring of the condition of cables and other assets via sensors prevents overloads, avoids waste and enables predictive maintenance.

These solutions based on data analysis are commonly adopted by energy multinationals in Italy and around the world. One example is GE Power, whose power generation equipment sold to utilities, produces more than 30% of the energy used worldwide. To ensure that its customer power stations operate efficiently, GE Power relies on Predix, an application that collects and analyses data on the AWS Cloud from thousands of IoT sensors located on equipment inside the power plants. By analysing data on AWS, GE Power helps power plant customers save millions of dollars, receive up to 500,000 data logs per second and scale to support the capture of 20 billion tags of data from sensors.

AIoT-based energy management has a further application: it enables optimisation of results in renewable generation plants, for example by helping to direct solar panels and maximise the use of the renewable sources in commercial bids.

DuneD: we also provide Actionable Insights for energy efficiency

Helping companies moving towards the data-driven company model is DuneD’s mission, and sustainability is an essential part of the data-driven company. It is not only about optimising energy efficiency in production processes, but also about carefully managing all resources and waste materials.

DuneD helps companies with the waste reduction and CO2 emissions by analysing corporate big data to enable intelligent decision-making. In particular, for consumption monitoring and optimisation, we develop AI models and dashboards on Amazon QuickSight that allow measuring and visualising efficiency data by type of energy source, operation and process and evaluate whether corrective or proactive management and optimisation actions are required. Based on the trends detected, customers can – to give an example in manufacturing – make their own considerations on which materials consume more or less given a specific energy source or depending on the process used; they can see which machines, operations and operation-machine combinations are the most efficient in terms of energy consumption and quantities produced; and they can also display a complete overview of machine stops to carefully manage production and stop periods and avoid unnecessary consumption.

Far from being the technology that takes over from man, Artificial Intelligence is a valuable ally for businesses and people to whom it offers new tools to improve productivity, quality of work and efficiency in handling the planet’s resources.