When teams collaborate around a digital source of truth, they can innovate business processes and operate with a broader global perspective
As the Asia Pacific region (APAC) stands at a crossroads between burgeoning energy demands and the urgent need for decarbonization, drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions is now imperative for governments, companies, and society at large.
To green the energy sector, innovation must fit within the immediate confines of APAC’s energy sector complexities. Energy is deeply linked to economic growth, but also accounts for an estimated three-quarters of total greenhouse gas emissions.
A far better way forward is balancing economic progress with industrial decarbonization to secure our lives and livelihoods for tomorrow.
The challenges are sacrifices are monumental and urgent, but hope is at hand: there are data-led technology solutions that we can deploy to start addressing these imperatives.
Data-led eco transformation
Decarbonization presents the opportunity to green the entire energy value chain without widescale disruptions. Industrial decarbonization involves designing and building new clean energy assets to capitalize on up-and-coming market opportunities.
At the same time, existing operations can be optimized for better efficiency and sustainability. Creating this greener future rests on the transformative power of data-led technologies in combination with human insight.
In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that 70% of new value created in the global economy over the next decade is likely to be based on digitally-enabled business platforms.
Existing digital technologies can deliver up to 20% of the reductions in energy consumption needed to achieve the International Energy Agency’s 2050 net-zero trajectories.
Transforming the energy industry
Advanced data management solutions in the Cloud can speed the uptake of clean energy technology solutions that have proven their commercial viability.
- In Australia, a data-centric approach has been deployed to manage the hundreds of wind turbines in its power grid. By combining information on weather, energy demand, and turbine performance with operational data, energy providers can have better visibility of wind vane performance, leading to a four-month return on investment based on overall production efficiency gains. In just one pre-emptive “catch”, it avoided an outage that would have cost approximately US$33–46m.
- Based on estimates by the link Asia Pacific Energy Research Centre, overall energy demand for the six biggest economies in the South-east Asian region is projected to increase by 218% based on existing trends in technology development, deployment, and policy frameworks. By streamlining costs and resources with green technology, the sector can produce energy at scale in sustainable ways. This is one tangible way the private sector enterprises in the energy sector can have incremental impact on Asia Pacific’s broad commitment to decarbonizing by 2050.
- The region’s energy infrastructure can be reimagined and incrementally reconfigured to create new economic and public value. This will require both engineering hardware and software innovations. Bringing advanced algorithms and data analytics together within a connected ecosystem is the first of many possible steps. These provide the industrial intelligence that energy business leaders need to build safe, cleaner, and agile operations in the future. When internal and external teams are collaborating around a digital source of truth, they can innovate business processes, operating with a broader global perspective.
- Driven in part by national aspirations, broader macroeconomic needs and regulatory responses, greener ways of doing business will become the norm.
Data-led technologies represent the common ground: meeting practical needs for operational efficiency, together with the aspiration of purposeful industrialization in defined and measurable ways. The good news is that these technologies can be deployed rapidly and on top of existing digital infrastructure.
