Schneider Electric: Sust-AI-nability at Sustainability LIVE

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Steven Brown, Vice President of Digital Energy Solutions, Schneider Electric
Steven Brown, VP of Digital Energy Solutions at Schneider Electric, explores the role of AI & digital in microgrids & decarbonising the built environment

Can digitisation and AI help us decarbonise? 

Let’s consider net zero buildings first. Look at a typical commercial office building. Typically, these buildings will use around 70% of their carbon emissions through operation – heating, cooling, management, etc – with 30% being embodied carbon emissions – concrete, steel, materials – that are typically categorised as Scope 3 emissions.

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The challenge is to focus on reducing operational emissions without increasing the embodied carbon emissions.

Very quickly we consider retrofitting – it's estimated that 50% of the buildings that will be here in 2050 are already in use today. That means that what's here is going to be used for a long time, but that's not always the most efficient stock.

A typical existing building has a carbon intensity of around two megatons of carbon dioxide per square metre. If you look at a brand new building with the most modern technology from the materials itself, double pane windows, to the control and automation, that carbon intensity plummets to 0.6 megatons of carbon dioxide. But there's quite a bit of embodied carbon to build that. 

Retrofitting is where you take an existing building, but instead of leaving it as is with the technology materials, retrofit it. If you're able to retrofit a typical commercial building, you can have half of the carbon emissions of a brand new build. In fact, a sixth of what you might call an existing building left unchanged.

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Retrofitting is a key part of reaching net zero buildings. The digital side comes in about how we do this. There are ten steps to decarbonise buildings categorised into strategise, digitise and decarbonise:

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Strategise

  1. Create decarbonisation roadmap

Digitise

  1. Track embodied carbon
  2. Measure and monitor energy and carbon 

Decarbonise

  1. Reduce energy and carbon through automation
  2. Purchase offsite renewables
  3. Electrify transportation
  4. Upgrade building systems and electrical infrastructure 
  5. Install onsite renewables 
  6. Limit embodies carbon
  7. Offset residual carbon emissions

So there's clearly quite a bit to do, but let’s look specifically at reducing energy and carbon through automation.

Reducing energy and carbon through automation

Buildings feel pretty static but they're living breathing entities. Air conditioning, heating, ventilation, security, access management – utilising modern building and power management systems is essential to have control of facilities. 

Space utilisation data is typically underutilised in buildings. Very few of us go to an office now every day at eight in the morning and leave it at five. Buildings are very dynamic, unpredictable and challenging to manage at times, given the kind of mixed use environment and hybrid work style. If you can extend the life of assets or make them run more efficiently, you're helping both operational efficiency and reducing the carbon that would be required to refresh that equipment.

Applying AI to automate and control it has a significant impact on the operations and carbon intensity of the building. 

How much do each of these steps impact a given building? How much does automation and AI actually make a difference, compared to all of the other potential retrofits that you can do for a building?

Graphic 4

In a light intervention – that doesn't require that much investment relative to other possibilities – automation, AI, measuring and controlling have a significant impact. We can reduce 18.7kg of carbon dioxide per year, per square metre by 8.4, just by automating and applying AI to make a building run more efficiently. 

Digital technologies make a building run much more efficiently.

Microgrids

A microgrid is effectively distributed energy resources that can island off of a grid. It can be small or large, it could be a solar array in batteries, or it could be a very large campus that uses massive solar implementation, battery energy storage systems, onboard hydrogen – all of which works as an intelligent system.

There are many benefits of a microgrid. You can get better economic performance because you can hedge against centralised fuel prices and go off grid when that makes sense. You can bring more reliable infrastructure because now you have additional sources of energy beyond what you're getting from a utility provider. But most importantly for this conversation, it can be more sustainable because you're onboarding green energy sources and then you're deploying those as it makes most sense for your operations.

This obviously introduces a level of complexity into the management of a system. How do you know when to charge your batteries versus use energy from the grid directly? What about potentially selling energy back to the grid when it makes most sense? How do you understand the tariff management system? Throughout all of that, how do you maintain resiliency knowing that at any time there could be an outage? These decisions have to be made as you're managing a microgrid and go beyond manual intervention – they require automated artificial intelligence to make your data centre run most effectively and, of course, most sustainably.

Microgrids are one example, but this is really the world that we're entering with the modern grid, where the prosumer (someone who produces and consumes) needs to be managed along an increasingly complex distribution and transmission ecosystem. 

It's very important that we consider digital digital technologies and artificial intelligence to help manage grid infrastructure, both at the microgrid level and in an overall grid system model.

Data centres

Digital and AI is really, really important. But that requires data centres. There's been significant growth in that market. How do we make these more efficient, reliable, safe and sustainable?

You can build a comprehensive strategy to procure PPAs and make a data centre more efficient – the digital infrastructure industry has been a leader in onboarding new green supply. You can use digital technology to reduce embodied carbon in the build process. 

How do we use building information management through construction to make sure that we're making the right decisions to reduce the carbon intensity of a given building?

How do we use the most efficient cooling systems to decarbonise a data centre environment? 

As digital becomes increasingly important in our lives, it's critical to remember there's no digital without digital infrastructure. There's no silver bullet. It's going to take a system that requires digital to manage intelligently. 

We believe that Electricity 4.0 is the fastest path to net zero.

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As digital becomes increasingly important in our lives, it's critical to remember there's no digital without digital infrastructure. There's no silver bullet. It's going to take a system that requires digital to manage intelligently. 

We believe that Electricity 4.0 is the fastest path to net zero.

To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.


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