Webinar: Exploring efficiency technologies that advance decarbonization | GE Vernova
Hello. Welcome to our webinar. It's with GE Vernova and Verdantix. Exploring efficiency technologies that advance decarbonization. I'd like to say thank you for attending and taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us for this, very dynamic webinar. There's going to be a few housekeeping, housekeeping questions or housekeeping items.
First, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Christy Pooler, and I lead product marketing here at GE Vernova in the software organization. A few things is throughout the present session. You'll notice to the right in your toolbar, there is going to be a box for Q&A. Throughout the presentation, please feel free to enter your questions in the Q&A, and we'll answer them as they come in. Or we will have, a Q&A session at the end of this presentations to answer as many questions as we can, that have come through.
Also, the panelist information is going to be under the speakers section within the webinar tool. So feel free after the webinar, to reach out, to some of our speakers or to us in general. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Paul Casto, our APM Industry Principal. Morning, everyone. It's my great pleasure to be with you today.
Thanks again for joining us. My role here at GE Vernova is, as an Industry Principal, and I work in two areas. I work in our asset performance management area and solutions, and I work in our carbon management area. So both of those areas are are areas I cover. I used to be a customer. I was a customer.
I got to lead a, reliability team for a large chemical company for a number of years and then joined, the GE team and, I'm also quite active in some global organizations. I have an interesting job. I travel around the globe and I'm heavily involved with, the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals. And on a global basis, the Global Forum for Maintenance and Asset Management and the World Partners in Asset Management, all of those things looking at asset performance as well as, as carbon management. So thank you for again for the chance to be with you today.
Hi, everyone. My name is Malavika Tohani, and I'm the Research Director for the Industrial Transformation practice at Verdantix. We are an independent research and advisory firm.
And, of course, as part of the industrial transformation practice, me and my team really focus on technologies that are helping industrial firms, make their operations more efficient, safe, and, of course, increasingly sustainable. Looking forward to today's presentation and talking about all the decarbonization technologies. With that, I think we can move on, with my section of the presentation. So I'm going to be really talking about, delivering decarbonization.
Looking specifically at efficiency technologies. And, I'll give you a little bit more insight into what efficiency technologies means and looks like in just a little while. I wanted to introduce Verdantix.
I know I said a few words about what we do. We we are really a thought leader for world enhancing innovation. We work with our clients, to talk about and discuss the trends regarding technologies of tomorrow. We also work with a lot of buyers to help them.
You know, either select a proper vendor for their technologies or even, talk about strategy on how to advance digital transformation as part of your facilities, industrial transformation research practices. One out of seven at Verdantix. If you want to know more about other research practices, including we have a net zero and energy transition research practice.
Please do visit our website. All right, let's, get on with the webinar. So first of all, I'm going to talk about some of the priorities in terms of decarbonization and net zero goals that industrial firms have set for themselves.
We speak to a lot of buyers, as part of our research. And so this is going to be a snapshot of some of the the data that we've collected, as part of our research process. And then we'll move on to talking about and discussing some key technologies. And I know Paul has some interesting case studies to present and talk about after that as well. Okay. Let's let's look at this.
Here. As you can see, I've provided a selection of examples, which shows that all major leading firms, whichever industry sector they belong to, have set themselves some sort of a decarbonization and net zero target. So decarbonization is still a big priority for a lot of firms. Certainly the targets, and speed at which some of these firms are moving to go towards targets are different. Some are certainly more aggressive than others, as you can see from, some of the explanations and targets that I've provided here.
So let's maybe take an example. AstraZeneca, wants to reduce its scope one and two emissions by 98% by next year. So 2026, is coming around quickly.
And eni which is the Italian oil and gas company also has set targets to reduce its scope one and two greenhouse gas emissions by 100% in its upstream activities, by 2030. And of course, it wants to reduce it, completely for all of, Eni by 2035. If you also look at some of the other firms that have listed here, majority of the targets revolve around, of course, one and two emissions, but also about using renewable electricity, in a lot of their operations and as part of their business.
So procuring renewable electricity is, is a big part of the decarbonization goals as well. Decarbonization is also being driven, in part by regulation but also by customer pressure. So let's maybe go to the, reputation risks that I've highlighted here. So at Verdantix, we, annually conduct a survey where we speak to over 300, buyers of technology.
This one I'm highlighting here is, a survey that we did, and we spoke to 350, buyers of, net zero. So chief sustainability officer, specifically, across different industries, and sectors globally. And we asked them a bunch of questions, one of them being, to what degree do these factors influence your firm's net zero strategy or target setting? And as you can see, it's not about, you know, profitability or, you know, compliance, which is certainly second, but top of the of this was brand reputation risks. And we have seen multiple examples of also in automotive firms, even oil and gas firms who have engaged in greenwashing and have been fined substantial amounts.
Or, you know, the CEOs have been let go or fired over not being, or not following any sustainable business practices. We've also seen that, a lot of these firms that have not, you know, had very sustainable businesses or have engaged in some sort of greenwashing, have seen, decline in their stock valuation as well. So there is clearly a link, between brand reputation, stock prices, and the growth of a particular company linked with the kind of net zero strategy, or target setting that, that they follow and especially this is true of certain types of industries, like fast moving consumer goods and so on, that are very much more customer facing than, some of the others, but also regulations, and even certain incentives, and legislations play a big role. As you can, see here again, I've tried to highlight a few, but also want to talk about some of the others that exist.
So, the EU rules to curb methane emissions from the energy sector, not just in Europe, but also across the globe. It became a legislation in 2024. And what this, legislation really says is that it requires EU gas, oil and coal operators to stop avoidable and routine flaring and to also reduce flaring. There's the other one here, which is the oil and gas decarbonization charter. And this is basically a charter that was adopted in Cop 28, and it motivates the oil and gas sector to decarbonize. And discharge has already been signed by over 50 firms, accounting for over 43% of the global oil and gas production.
And so what are some of the goals, of this charter? So it says that net zero operations for the oil and gas sector by or before 2050. Aiming for net zero upstream methane emissions by 2030 and zero routine flaring by 2030. And so all the firms, the 50 firms, that have signed up to this charter are going to be putting in place or have already put in place, targets and activities to, to reach those sorts of, you know, goalposts that has been set. Also talking a little bit about some of the other countries and what's going on there. So, for example, Australia has enacted its safeguard mechanism, which is part of its climate change policy. And this really applies to large facilities that emit over 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year.
So really, facilities, you know, in the mining, oil and gas extraction, manufacturing, and waste sectors and what the safeguard mechanism states is that they must keep their net emissions under their, baseline. And this baseline is basically calculated or recalculated, every year based on production. Also some of the developing countries who are, you know, really taking center stage and, having a lot of high growth, but maybe have not been so focused on decarbonization and net zero in the past have started playing, a big role as well.
So as you can see here, you know, India in December 2024 launched the world's first taxonomy of green steel, by specifying its emission intensity. So it set the threshold of 2.2 tonnes of, carbon dioxide per tonne of finished steel. And this is really expected to encourage decarbonization especially in the very unsustainable or, you know, environmentally not very environment, environment friendly steel industry. So a combination of customer pressure, brand reputation risks, along with legislations and certain incentives are really, have a half cap decarbonization, a priority for a lot of funds. So this is, again, a little bit of Verdantix survey data that I'm sharing here.
This is from the industrial transformation practice. We spoke to 304 buyers of technologies, across different industries globally. And we asked them about their budgets, their priorities, their tech preferences for the next 12 months.
And here, as you can see, we clearly asked them, how is your firm standard decarbonization of plant operations expected to change in the next 12 months and nearly half of the 304 respondents. So 46% said they plan to increase their spend on decarbonization. And this is in is in line with whatever trend we've seen. Till now.
And again, we focused on firms that had over 100 million in revenues, $100 million in revenues, all the way up to 20 billion plus. So, it really nicely summarizes that there is still quite a bit of positivity about investing in decarbonization. We also asked them about, of course, what's the key factor driving digital transformation of your plant operations. And as you can see, nearly 60% said corporate decarbonization is the biggest, you know, driver for digital transformation and investing in digital technology. Of course, cost reduction and efficiency improvements, they go really hand in hand. So it was it was second.
But if you look at very significant and significant then certainly it it pushes higher. But corporate decarbonization is still the top three. Even if you combine very significant and significant for, for these, firms to invest in digital technology. And we all, you know, talk about it, we all know it, that digital transformation or digital has a huge part to play in advancing decarbonization and helping reach those net zero targets faster.
So, in this question, as you can see, we are asking about, a host of different ESG and net zero kind of initiatives, and seeing what's a priority for industrial firms. The responses are quite varied. In fact, number one, priority, I would say not many respondents maximum I think was 15% stated a priority to be their really number one priority. But even looking at, let's say number one and high priority here, some of the basics are still true.
You know, electrification of industrial processes and equipment, especially like in the mining sector is a good example of this. They want to electrify a lot of their, you know, vehicles and trucks and so on. To help reduce, their energy consumption, first of all, but also reach those sort of net zero targets, talking about replacing aging and inefficient industrial equipment. You know, we are aware that in certain industries, equipment that's operational in there can be 30, 40, 50 years old and, one of the biggest things is the new equipment and technologies available today are much, much more efficient, you know, environment friendly, sustainable. So, that's kind of like a big priority in terms of just for investment in aging, inefficient equipment. And we can also talk a little bit around, you know, reducing the energy consumption of industrial processes and equipment.
Last year, we published a report which was looking at the capabilities of very on a very high level. We did an analysis looking at the capabilities of providers offering energy management software, you know, for, for different industries and it is certainly, always a top area of investment and maybe a low hanging fruit as well, to reduce energy consumption, reduce emissions thereby, and then reach, those net zero targets. We look at some of these, especially around the investment in, some of the technologies, a bit more detail in the second part of this, webinar. Okay.
So this brings us nicely to talking about some of the technologies that support decarbonization and how to really get that. So this was a report that we did last year. Again, looking at what are some of the different technologies that are available and how we can kind of club them or segment them that help with decarbonization. As you can see, we have split it across three key levers.
First one is technologies that help with efficiency improvements. And that's really the crux of the webinar today. This is where we will be focusing the the webinar.
However, I energy Vernova, plays in all three of these segments and offers technologies that supports all three of these levers. The second one we're talking about is clean energy transition. So things like, combined heat and power, fleet electrification, coal to biomass, and technologies like that battery energy storage, especially, you know, for power utilities, but also in the transportation, area. And final one is around advanced decarbonization. So technologies, that really aim for deep reductions that make a direct impact on carbon emissions. They usually involve significant changes in, in terms of energy sources and storage as well as process methodologies.
So what we are talking about here is like carbon capture and storage, you know, renewable power. So energy transition, thermal batteries, so different types, direct air capture, and also different sorts of feedstock and electrolyzers and so on. But as I said, the focus of the webinar today is really to look at certain technologies in the efficiency improvement area.
And we're going to be discussing that in bit more detail. I really like this, slide. And I also like the information that's been provided here.
You know, we are at a stage where, the world is in a bit of a flux, especially around sustainability and, you know, net zero and the priorities associated with reaching these sorts of goals. And at the end of the day, for a lot of industrial fans, keeping the lights on is is the most important thing. Achieving top and bottom line is still the most important thing. Of course, decarbonization helps with all of this, but in a, in a, sort of a tight or pressurized macroeconomic environment, you know, sometimes, decarbonization or sustainability can take a little bit of a backseat, but, you know, there is no reason why some of the traditional technologies that firms have always used are now being seen a bit of a different light, because they can help reach net zero targets as well.
And this is a very powerful message that this really slide gives out. As you can see, we asked how do you see the role of industrial technologies in achieving your firm’s net zero goals? And the top one in terms of being critical and helpful? So nearly a third of the respondents said that predictive maintenance software was critical in helping them, in helping their firms achieve net zero goals, while a further 44% said that it was helpful. And similarly with production optimization software, you know, and in total, nearly, 83% of the respondents have stated production optimization software, is either critical or helpful in reaching their firm’s net zero goals. So not only is this delivering on, you know, traditional, KPIs for a firm, but a lot of the firms have also started looking at and also measuring some of the, the net zero and sustainability impacts these technologies can have.
So similarly, you know, we talking about field service management software especially that helps to manage technicians who are geographically quite, spread out, enterprise asset management software, asset investment planning software that's used to kind of do capital allocation over a longer period, say over 10 to 20 year timeline and how these can contribute to, helping optimize activities, operations, processes, much better. And that is closely linked with the increase in spend that we are also seeing for some of these, software categories, especially around asset maintenance and performance, which I know Paul is going to be talking a lot about after my presentation. So, as you can see, when we asked them, how is your firm’s spend on the following operations and maintenance software going to change in the next 12 months? Pretty much the top five is if you look at the top five categories, it's around performance and maintenance. So plant simulation software. So even things like digital twins software that can mimic entire processes or sometimes even all of the entire facility is being used to simulate different scenarios and to arrive at the most optimal scenario, which helps minimize wastage, improve quality, improve throughput.
And all the other metrics, involved. APM software again, a key one, you know, by analyzing machine failures, by catching those early, you know, you're, you're doing kind of like, like smart leak management, emissions management, you're leading to low emissions and how that can impact, some of the net zero goals as well, computerized maintenance management systems, as well as EAM software, which is primarily used for preventive maintenance activities and how the, respondents are saying that that's also contributing really to achieving some of their, net zero goals in terms of optimizing the workforce, improving the efficiency of activities that are being carried out. And also, we need to remember when we talk, when we talk about, sustainable operations.
Yes, it's about net zero goals, but it's also about getting the work done in a very safe manner. You know, so the impact on the environment is one, but impact on the workforce, the workers itself is another. So by ensuring there are zero incidents, that's that's a sustainable business as well. And let's look at this at a bit more detail.
In this in this slide. So try to highlight some of those efficiency technologies that we asked about in the previous slide. And I've highlighted a few here. That, that make sense for us. Of course. We're going to go into much, much more detail about the APM site, in the, in the presentation as well in the rest of this webinar. But also we've tried to see the impact of some of these technologies.
On the decarbonization potential. So as you can see. And how mature is it? So APM, of course, is a well established technology. There are multiple case studies that are available out there on how customers have achieved, not just, you know, profitability and lower downtime and cost and efficiency improvements, but also how has that contributed to their emissions reduction goals? Similarly, I alluded to this CMMS and EAM software that we were talking about, digital energy twin, you know, creating a replica of your physical energy system or equipment or assets, whether it's, it's a, you know, a set of turbines or even an entire facility, and then simulating the performance and seeing where real time adjustments can be made to, to optimize some of the activities over that really high impact on, on, on the decarbonization potential. Energy management software, something that has a direct impact on, the firm's net zero goals.
And as I said, you know, actually the energy management software is much, much more advanced on the real estate and built environment side. Something to do with commercial buildings. The industrial energy management software landscape is still a little bit more rudimentary, but it is it is expanding.
They are bringing in newer capabilities around, even allowing for energy trading, power purchase agreements and capabilities like that. And also production optimization software. Again, you know, how can you use technology to maximize your yield, your throughput, but also ensure that your quality is really high so that you're minimizing wastage. Maybe you're also optimizing for, the resources, the amount of, raw materials, that need to be used right at the beginning.
And given all the supply chain pressures all businesses have been facing, since the beginning of this year, this is certainly something, to be used. And I know customers who have, you know, enjoyed like a 5 to 10% increase or optimization of their activities using some of these technologies. I know we, we want to hear more from Paul about, some of the customer case studies that GE has, enabled with it, with its own solutions. So with that, that that brings me to the end of my, section, and I'll hand over to Paul. Just a friendly reminder.
We would love to answer any questions that come through. So please enter your questions in the Q&A box, located on the right hand side. Bottom corner. We will take all questions at the end of this webinar. So please ask away. Over to you, Paul.
Well, thank you for that. That was, very interesting, discussion there. I want to talk about a couple of things today. One is, you know, what can we do today? Getting to net zero is going to be hard. And like many things we do when we start the journey, there's low hanging fruit. And so in many cases, if you happen to work in the power industry, we might be able to retire coal plants and replace that power with, low carbon energy sources or renewable sources.
And that gives us a big jump on our carbon reduction. But the closer we get to net zero, the harder it's going to be. And we need to start thinking about what can we do to squeeze more and more emissions out of our processes and our daily work as we go forward. And there are a lot of tools that we can use to do that. Some different things that I want to talk about today, but but I think this is, really important.
As we get closer, we need to think about other things. And many of these things we could do today. We could go ahead and start one. I tend to think about quitting equipment a lot in the field and and reliability of that equipment. My, focus for the last 20 years really has been, in the reliability area and enabling work processes and tools to, to enable that, reliability processes out in the field.
So let's, let's think about, that and some things that, that could be done. And it was very interesting if you were taking notes, we heard about this oil and gas decarbonization charter. And one of the things in that charter was, we need to reduce flaring out there. So if you think about a refinery, many of the processes in a refinery are coupled together. And when we have an equipment failure, especially an unexpected equipment failure, you may notice a flare going off. And then as time goes on, some additional flares go off.
And, you know, you look across the plant and there are a number of flares. And any time we know we're flaring, we're putting, you know, we're burning up energy and we're putting carbon into the air. So, a lot of equipment failures can be related directly to these kind of things, these equipment failures. I think another interesting note we heard was we have a lot of aging equipment, a lot of our facilities are quite old. And the equipment in there, is aging. And when it ages, it needs a couple of things. One,
our ability to make that equipment more reliable can be, difficult. And the new equipment that might replace that is generally more energy efficient. And, it is, a challenge that we have to overcome. We have a lot of unexpected events, you know, things that we didn't proactively look into the future to see.
And when we have an unexpected event, it is really difficult. So think about a failure that happens that we're not, not anticipating. We have to scurry around. We typically, interrupt planned work.
We have people come from all over the place. They jump in their carts, they come to the thing we may have to expedite parts. All kind of inefficient use of energy happens when we have an unexpected event. So as we think about what we could do today, one thing that we need to to sort of focus on when it comes to carbon and carbon emissions, some of our equipment out in the plant is more critical than others. And there's a clear relationship between the reliability of this carbon critical equipment and our ability to overall reduce our carbon emissions.
Now. Here's a couple of interesting things. That happens. The American Council for, Energy Efficient Economy says that equipment reliability could reduce energy consumption, 15 to 20%.
And the Department of Energy says that equipment failures account, you know, when it comes to waste and energy, about 38% of all that wasted energy that's out there. So not only is there a loss of production and higher repair costs any time, we have a reactive situation. We have supply chain interruptions, not to mention, potential safety issues. Not only do those things occur, unexpected failures are, you know, just to repair them are much more expensive there, you know, conservatively say that 3 to 5 times more expensive. And when we have to respond to these unplanned failures, there's a significant waste of energy that can occur.
So just thinking about energy, just thinking about wasted energy and all of that wasted energy that, we could eliminate will contribute to a reduction in carbon emissions. And as I stated earlier, the closer we get to net zero, the more we need to be focusing on these kind of things to, to help us achieve that. So what are the things that, that we could do today? Well, you saw this slide earlier.
You know, GE really participates in, in all of these areas. We, are really focused a lot on the clean energy transition. Everything from fleet electrification to, power plants, single cycle combined cycle systems, all kind of things.
We're really trying to leverage technology to shift us from high carbon to low carbon to renewable sources of energy, all of those kind of things. We're also heavily involved in sort of advanced decarbonization technology, renewable energies, when battery storage all kind of, digital twin, any kind of things that we can do in these areas around advanced technology, we're working in those areas. But up in the upper left hand corner we see energy efficiency.
Now a real goal here around energy efficiency is to make our existing plants more energy efficient. We want to see less emissions and we want them to be more reliable. We believe if your plants are more reliable, you'll use less energy and you'll have less carbon emissions. And we have a, a number of tools in this area, of course. Principally, it's, asset performance management, but we also have digital twins, that are combined with APM to look at different things. And of course, waste heat recovery and overall operational efficiency in that area.
So, so GE Renova works in in all of these areas. But today we're principally going to talk about, what's what can we do around efficiency and making improvements. So when I think about what we can do today, there are sort of four categories. I like to talk about. One is, improving equipment reliability.
I'll talk about that more, building proactive strategies, so that we are, looking sort of, as I sometimes characterize it, we want to look into the future. We want to know what our risk is to give us some insights. And we want our proactive strategies, to give us data to tell us when our equipment, is deteriorating, we want to reduce our energy usage. And then, of course, an area that we call mechanical integrity, which is really about leaks. It's, how can we minimize leaks of all kinds of different things and including greenhouse gases So let's think about improving equipment reliability. Some things that we do today, one of the first things we do in our processes is equipment criticality.
We typically look at equipment and it's criticality based on production or based on maintenance cost or process or our personal safety. Certainly. You could also, depending on the businesses that you're working in, you could have some other areas that you look at. But how many of us are starting to think about our equipment, and its criticality related to carbon emissions now, that's an interesting concept. And it would be easy to do as we, as we start, this criticality analysis, we could easily think about, this fact that and that some of our equipment may not be critical from a production standpoint or from a maintenance cost standpoint, but the loss of an, that equipment through an unexpected failure could lead to significant carbon emissions. And we need to understand, from a carbon emission standpoint, what is our most critical equipment out in the plant.
Now, once we understand from a carbon emissions, viewpoint that critical equipment, then we want to understand the risks associated with that. So if you're in the reliability business, you're really in the risk management business. So we want to think about that and the risk associated with it. Once we understand that risk we want to start looking at the failures that may have led to carbon emissions. And how about we start building bad actors for carbon emissions? We do bad actors all the time today for maintenance cost for production loss, for all of those kind of things. But I'm suggesting, you know, starting with criticality, then understanding risk, then we could easily start doing bad actors.
Now, once we start doing bad actors with respect to emissions, what that's going to do is point our our efforts. It's going to point us to those bad actors so that we can start building much more proactive strategies. May be a low priority in many other areas, but for carbon now we need to step back and we need to start looking at what are the failure modes, and what strategies should we be employing to address those failure modes. So building proactive strategies, quantifying risk and and having those strategies, based on industry standards will certainly help us, with our preventive and predictive, technologies that we can apply in these areas.
We also may be thinking about applying digital twins, digital twins, to give us some insight, that we currently, might not have bringing all that data together out in the field. We have many sources of data, but we need to bring that data together to give us more insight and to help us make data driven decisions, so that we can be much more proactive in the care of our equipment. And if we're more proactive in the care of our equipment, that we either plan for failures or that we have insight into when a failure might occur that's going to help us, leverage those technologies to lower our energy usage.
So we want to be able to continually monitor this equipment to give us insights into that equipment health. And once we have those insights and equipment health, we can do things around operational risk to help us with our daily and weekly work list. And then lastly, is leaks. You know, if you start to think about the pipelines and compressors and different things that are involved in that process, you know, as that equipment deteriorates, degradation processes come into play, the equipment starts to deteriorate, in leaks form.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had some idea about that equipment health, the deterioration, degradation mechanisms that are into play to give us some ideas about, impending greenhouse gas release so that we could proactively, improve the health of that equipment to minimize those releases. So there's a plethora of things that we could do, starting with criticality and then to asset strategy, the application of predictive, technologies to help us, as we move forward to get a better view of the health of our equipment so that we can be much more proactive in reducing unexpected failures, which are going to lead to a reduction in energy usage, as well as our ability to manage, carbon releases. And here's some case studies I thought we just might want to see there. There are three of them, but we won't go through all these in detail. But the first with was with Oman Global Energy and there, they were really focused on the mechanical integrity.
And you can see, a lot of good things happen. So not only do our compliance go up, does the, leak rate go down there in this case, was a lot of savings. A total savings, was, as you can see, nearly $60 million there. And they avoided a number of turnaround events. They were much more proactive in the view of their equipment, health and what they needed to do when it comes to outage planning.
All of those things, deliver value, but also help us be proactive, around carbon emission. The second was, was a power company in Europe. And here they avoided a big failure because, they had some early warnings.
They were, in this case, applying some, digital twins. So, real, looking to their equipment to give them some insights using, a lot of almost real time data that they bring in to give them a better view of the health of this equipment, to give them really leading indicators of failure modes. And in this case, they found one. And what you can see here is they dug into this, found out what the root cause. And they avoided losing a, a low carbon energy, a piece of production, just by, being much more proactive, using digital twins to give them some insight.
Lastly, we have an example from a mining company around, water cooling supply. You can see there, they dug into the root cause they had some, some proactive, analysis that went on, and, they saved a lot of money. So I put these up for you to consider two things. One is, in our traditional sense, you can see this is really good stuff.
It's saving us a lot of money, and we're becoming much more reliable. But as we become more reliable and as we move to a much more proactive state, we see that, our decarbonization efforts are going to increase. And I, I keep wanting to go back to where I started. The closer we get to net zero, the more we're going to need to focus on these things to help us get to net zero. So let's think about, how we might identify these opportunities.
Well GE Vernova has a, solution called CERious and CERious really is around, emissions data management. And it starts with our ability to be able to automate, verify and automatically correct data problems. So, I visit a lot of places, and, and a lot of people are collecting a lot of data around emissions. Sometimes, there are multiple groups collecting data, different data and bringing all that data together is very difficult. So at the end of the quarter, when they have to do reporting, there's a, a week's worth of work just getting that data manually integrated together. So what we want to be able to do is understand where our emissions are.
We want to be able to automate that data collection. And when we have a problem where we're missing data, today, if we're missing data, we probably manually go in and fill in the blanks. We want to use digital twins to help us go in and fill in those blanks automatically. So that this whole process on the front end is, much more automated, much more efficient, for us. Then we move from there, and we really want to measure decarbonization performance. Remember I said we should be building bad actors around carbon emissions.
So we want to be able to monitor that. And we want to proactively know, if we have a problem in a particular area. And if we do, we want to address those emission problems proactively.
And then of course is reporting. So now we've got the data where monitoring our equipment and processes out there. And now we need to report that data. So that can be complex, especially if data is in a lot of different areas.
By different groups. So we want to integrate that data. We want to be able to simplify this complex reporting process and customize it to the reporting that you need. Now, after we've done that, we need to think about how are we going to get to, to net zero, how are we further going to lower our carbon emissions? And that's, an area we call strategizing. And strategizing allows us to make, what we call meaningful investments, for the future.
And it allows us to weigh different options, different things that we might do. And and then lastly, make some actionable decisions around, here's our plan, here's where we're headed. And what's the trade off between cost and efficiency? All of those kind of things. And, and this CERious solution really brings, all of these things together and helps us in these areas.
Lastly, I want to talk about just a couple of things. And, and, then I'll finish my section up. But, I mentioned earlier, we want to make data driven decisions, and we want to use data not only in our daily work life out in the out, in the facilities, but also to help us make, good, impactful decarbonization decisions as we develop our strategies. And we need to be able to model, we want to be able to to build different scenarios for us to consider, we want to be able to simulate what we can optimize out there. And then we've got performance versus our goals. Here's where we want to be this year. Here's where we really are.
We need to be modeling and optimizing to help us understand where we are from, our performance and goals. And and lastly, where are we on cost? Where are we on our emissions? And we want to bring all those things together. So I want to talk to you about, a case study in, around, company Xcel Energy.
And Xcel is a very data driven company. Data, and that is a fundamental basis for decision making. They're going to make. And so when they were thinking about carbon carbon emissions, they wanted to become much more data driven. So we did a pilot with them last year. And it was a very interesting.
And they they had some some real challenges that they were trying to address. They had pressure from leadership. Their leadership wanted them to make, real progress. Their investors wanted to make real progress in terms of carbon emissions. And they needed a way to, be able to bring all this data together to simplify the process and to give them some, insight. And so we did a lot of work in this area, really, bringing all that data together.
And our goals for this pilot, our goals was to automate. You remember, that first step on that last slide was to automate a lot of this data and this data collection as well as fill in the blanks. You know, when we had missing data, how could we use digital twins to help us fill in the blanks? Well, they had really good results. A simple so they were able to central centralize all this data. They use a CERious software to do that.
And they had real transparency. So all through the organization, not only from their leadership team but through the rest of the organization, they had real transparency, and they were able to link this in with their existing asset performance management system. So they essentially were able to integrate these, systems together to give them some proactive strategies. Looking forward, to help them, be better prepared. And as I said, they wanted to really automate and, and, and build support throughout the organization.
So they were able to successfully do that. And, and the real keys, there were, data automation collection of that data, putting it together, being able to develop, reporting, the reporting that they needed, you know, focused on the, on their particular needs. So that's, that's the kind of thing that's going on in the world today. Our ability to gather that data and our ability to link these, data systems and with asset performance management to help us, be better, around our management of that data. So, that's just some key insights that I hope you found interesting.
If you have additional questions, we'll take some of those, or if, if we want to look up, if you have other questions that you want to talk about offline, I'll be happy to do that. But now I want to hand this back to Christy and, Christy, will sort of, manage the next section for us. Great.
Thank you, Paul, and thank you, Malavika, for your presentation. It was very informative and and I learned a lot as well. So we do have a few questions that have come in. The first one is going to be for Malavika. The question is, do you see any geopolitical shifts globally that may impact the priorities of decarbonization projects? Hi, Malavika.
Were you able to answer that? How's your technical? Oh hi Christy, I hope you can hear me. Sorry. I think the screen is just. The screen just froze for a moment over there. No, I can absolutely, take take that question. They certainly I mean, geopolitical pressures have in the past played a, played a role in decarbonization.
I mean, not so long ago, you know, before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in early 2022, you know, Russian natural gas was, the main input into, you know, Europe's energy mix. I think it accounted for about, 40% of Europe's natural gas imports. And after obviously, you know, the the invasion, the European Commission in response, is implementing, it's a repower EU, which is basically a plan to phase out Russian fossil fuel imports. And so this involves things like, I think the renewable energy target now for Europe is 42% by 2030 and also comes with an investment of about €210 billion to, you know, to advance that clean energy transition. So making there are basically more energy independent and resilient. And the face of this.
So it has traditionally, you know, geopolitical shifts have it's a bit difficult to predict what what might happen. Certainly obviously, you know, with the lot of news surrounding President Trump's, you know, sort of policies and regulations and how that's going to pan out and how, you know, the the relationship with like, China, that might certainly impact some, some decarbonization projects, maybe certain industries might be a bit more affected than the others. But, yeah, it's really difficult to call out some big geopolitical, political shifts that that's going to happen.
But yeah, I guess the, the more apparent ones are already happening. Now that that's that's great. Yeah.
Like how you, you brought that back to even geopolitical or, but just how things can change in a moment and and bringing the, the EU, stats back back to life. So that's that's really important. Another one came in from from the chat is about oil and gas. So oil and gas by nature is higher emissions. I'm getting pressure from my boss to find more ways to reduce. Can APM help me address this and and how where's the best way to start? And I'll take Paul as that's for you.
Okay. Great. Well, I think the best way to start with the basics I think that's right. We're going to get more and more pressure from our leadership team to help reduce emissions.
And so let's just go back to a couple of things I suggested. One, we should understand from an emissions standpoint, from a carbon emission standpoint, what's our most critical equipment, out in the field. And for that equipment, we need to start developing strategies, to help us be more proactive, to make that equipment more reliable and to give us insights around those particular failure modes, which can lead to, a failure, which, you know, results in carbon emissions. It may even result in if you're in a refinery, add on carbon emissions, you know, as, some of the processes, have to be slowed down and multiple flares go off in the facility. So, yes. APM is a great tool to start with.
And, you know, it's the basics. It's a criticality, it's bad actors with carbon. And then it's developing strategies and, and root cause analysis around, those particular failures.
Great. Thank you. There another one came in.
There's a lot of news about the utilities and power moving away from fossil fuels by 2050. Again, going back to that carbon neutral. Malavika, this is for you. Do you think this is aggressive and achievable based on your research across the globe? Yeah, it's a good question.
I think we also have to understand the inherent differences between net zero, emission versus being carbon neutral. I mean, carbon neutral is is balancing the amount of carbon dioxide you're pumping into the environment and then balancing it out. So, you know, I know, lots of companies do that already by, say, in reforestation or, you know, think activities like that to achieve carbon neutrality. And maybe that's, that's a little bit more achievable. I know, again, that, the, the renewable energy mix, especially in electricity generation, is increasing substantially, on a global level.
And by 2050, certainly, I think the majority of our, electricity is going to come from renewable sources. And as you and as I highlighted, you know, in that first slide, a lot of the pathways to reduce emissions is by sourcing renewable electricity. You know, every company has that as their major, for a power utility or for the utility sector in general. Again, might be a little bit ambitious. 2050 does seem, I mean, at this point in time seems further away, but also it's coming at light speed.
Right. And I know people utilities have set targets, but it's about how they go about reducing the core emissions as part of their operations and facilities, and that will only come by that will not just come by switching to renewable power generation, but also they'll have to think about scope one, two and three. So I think for utilities especially, scope three is going to be a bit of a complicated one to, to kind of resolve. And they'll have to start thinking about how they can push customers to be more efficient as well. So it's not just about their own operations, but how are they influencing demand for electricity going forward? And, it might be a bit easier for us, you know, here in some of the developed economies, which are also facing a lot of macroeconomic pressures, but there are economies like China and India that really continue to grow.
And, you know, they have a lot of electricity demands. And so for companies maybe specifically there to reach their own net zero targets might be a bit harder and 2050 might be, not as achievable. They'll make tremendous progress towards it, but is 100% achievable is, I think, a question mark. Great.
Thank you. Just to add on to that, in your poll, I'm going to ask you to, to provide your opinion on that same question. You did go over emissions.
Data management is just kind of setting some baselines of knowing where you stand today. What are your thoughts on that Paul? I thought that was a great answer that she just gave. And there is a big difference, as we think about, trying to get to, to net zero, versus carbon neutral. And I just as we think about getting to net zero and I spend a lot of time, as you know, out in the field, out in the plants and I see a lot of activity that goes on. We're going to have to get a lot more efficient, in our facilities, to get to, net zero.
So I think it's going to be a challenge. I think it's a challenge that, we're going to have to address on multiple fronts, you know, not only moving to renewable energy, and those kind of supplies, but also becoming much more efficient, becoming much more reliable. I think it's going to be a challenge, but, I think we'll make great progress over the next years, as we move in that direction. Great. Thank you. I did have one about budget, so I hopefully we can squeeze that in.
Paul, talks about budgets are being cut. You know, folks are retiring. But also additional funding is not coming in, for new programs. So.
So what are what's some of your advice there on where you can start or where you can, make some savings and still decarbonize? Well, that's a tough situation. You know, any time, performance, numbers are moving on you and your budgets are being cut, and you're told to make improvements to a cutting budget. What you're going to need is you're going to need the tools.
You're going to need tools and things to be able to, help you become more efficient to enable processes, so that you can do things more effectively, more efficiently, and at a lower cost. So I do think, as you think about certainly, asset performance management, the ability to integrate data to be able to improve the efficiency of our workforce in the field of our engineers or decision makers to make more data driven decisions, those certainly will all drive lower cost. And and we've got to become more proactive. We've got to enable more proactive technologies. We've got to start leveraging, digital twins to help us. But, I think those things are going to be the application of proactive technologies, the use of digital twins, our ability to build strategies that, that make us more reliable, all of things, all of those things will just, you know, drive, improved performance at a lower cost.
But, there's work to get there from where we are today to where we want to be. And there's quite a bit of work to be done. Great. That's a fantastic advice. Again, we're at the end of our session.
There is one more thing I wanted to remind folks and invite everyone to, the GE Vernova’s user conference. I'm not able to advance to my slide. So, anybody else able to advance on on your end? But in any event, go ahead and take a look at our website. We'll have there's the QR code there.
We are having an APM user conference, and we're, more than and happy to invite everyone who attended this call and your friends and family. Come join us in Houston. If you want to learn a little bit more about, our technologies and how to use them and learn from customers.
And with that, I thank everyone for attending and, good day and good night to all. Thank you. Bye.
2025-03-30 13:34
