As the world transitions to cleaner energy systems and industries start to decarbonise, it is vital to keep sustainability top of mind.

Software giant AVEVA is seeing many opportunities to aid “green growth” in South Africa and help organisations reach their sustainability objectives. 

Addressing delegates at the twenty-ninth X-Change conference, held from June 4 to 7, in the Drakensberg, AVEVA global sustainability head Lisa Wee said AVEVA’s solutions were increasingly being used to drive greater sustainability across global markets.

She stated that the importance of sustainability continued to rise even in a multi-crisis environment, in a world with soaring energy costs and inflation, as well as persistent supply chain disruption.

“Sustainability is still at the forefront of future business success,” she asserted.

For AVEVA, credibility is currency. The group aims to spark industrial ingenuity and drive the responsible use of the world’s resources through the use of the right information at the right time.

Wee shared that 45% of the top 2 000 global listed companies have made net-zero commitments, which has led to increased scrutiny about what sustainability goals actually mean.

AVEVA is committed to delivering the lowest-carbon solutions for customers. The group is launching its Sustainability Accelerator later this year, with systems to better track green innovation and incentivise sales.

Looking at energy in particular, industrial engineering group ThyssenKrupp is using AVEVA 3D to optimise new plant designs, as the company moves to produce 11 100 t/y of green hydrogen.

Energy company Dominion Energy is using AVEVA Data Hub to share renewable energy information with partners through the cloud and take carbon capture from concept stage to a service offering for customers, while petrochemicals group BP is using AVEVA Process Optimisation for energy management.

Engineering and technology group Sener is using AVEVA’s single control platform that integrates a digital automated control system with the solar field, calibration and data to reduce downtime at the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant, at 510 MW, in Morocco.

Another example of AVEVA assisting in companies’ energy efficiency and decarbonisation efforts is AVEVA helping multinational conglomerate Reliance Industries save $12-million a year in energy monitoring and refinery optimisation.

“To truly drive transformation at speed and scale, what we need is radical collaboration. We need all the players in the value chain understanding how they are connected environmentally, operationally and economically, which allows them to optimise holistically,” Wee averred.

She emphasised the need for connected industrial economies and information being shared seamlessly across organisations. “We need to engineer faster and more sustainably using live digital twins. Digital twin analysis in project design and execution has been estimated to optimise capital expenditure by 10% to 15% and reduce risk by between 30% and 50%.”

Wee said reducing risk was crucial to commercialisation in the energy sector.

STARTING POINT
Wee told Engineering News on the sidelines of X-Change that a materiality assessment is a good start for companies that were starting to devise a sustainability strategy or goals.

She explained that companies had to understand where their sustainability impacts were and determine what sustainability and the commitments mean for their organisations, including its suppliers, partners, customers and other key stakeholders.

A materiality assessment will help to distinguish which categories of sustainability are material to the organisation. For example, logistics is not as material an issue to AVEVA in its sustainability journey, but climate change is.

Commenting on where a culture of sustainability started within an organisation, Wee cited both leadership and grassroots communities. Although certain key performance indicators and metrics were set at the “top” of an organisation, Wee said there was often a grassroots community of employees who drove change.

She mentioned the importance of developing sustainability champions in middle layers of management and ensuring that all teams were on board with the sustainability strategy and embedding it in their operations, from the information technology and finance teams, through to human resources.

Having a sustainability strategy in place is a “win-win” situation, Wee stated, explaining that the sustainable use of resources could drive down costs and lower emissions.

For example, food manufacturer Kellogg’s has managed to save $3.3-million a year through reduced energy use and efficient water management using digital software and external insights in its use of natural resources.

“What gets measured gets managed,” she concluded, adding that no one sustainability strategy was a one-size-fits-all for all organisations, and certainly not for all countries.

*Marleny Arnoldi attended the X-Change 2023 conference as a guest of IS³ and AVEVA.