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Sustainability LIVE: Net Zero – Digitalisation with Lisa Wee

By Georgia Collins
October 16, 2024
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Lisa Wee, Global Head of Sustainability at AVEVA, delivers a keynote focused on the role of digitalisation in driving sustainability across industries

At Sustainability LIVE: Net Zero, attendees had the chance to hear from Lisa Wee, the Global Head of Sustainability at AVEVA.

In her keynote, Lisa addresses the critical role of data and digital solutions in advancing sustainability across various industries.

With more than 20,000 customers, AVEVA is at the forefront of helping sectors like energy, food and transportation optimise operations to meet ambitious climate commitments.

Data-driven sustainability in focus 

Lisa highlights the importance of sustainability and digitalisation, emphasising their role as key drivers of innovation and growth across industries.

According to her, even amid global challenges, sustainability continues to rise in importance for AVEVA's clients, especially as they move from simply making climate commitments to actively implementing them.

“We’ve gone beyond the point of setting those commitments; we’re really getting into implementation,” she notes.

As she explains, this shift has led to significant pressure on companies, particularly with the increasing granularity of regulatory reporting requirements, driven by investor demands.

Lisa also points out that it’s not just external pressures — employees are increasingly interested in how companies are making tangible progress toward sustainability.

This shift is influencing how businesses like AVEVA communicate their achievements.

The global carbon footprint and industry’s role 

Lisa draws attention to a striking statistic: power and industry combined were responsible for more than 65% of global emissions in 2020.

She stresses that without decarbonising these hard-to-abate sectors, meaningful progress on climate change is not possible.

“If we can’t help these sectors to decarbonise quickly, we won’t make significant progress,” Lisa explains.

To this end, AVEVA is playing a crucial role by offering digital solutions to support decarbonisation efforts.

As Lisa elaborates, AVEVA is not just advising its clients but also leading by example.

The company is aiming to cut its value chain emissions by 50% by 2030 and has already had its targets validated.

Lisa highlights that AVEVA's strategy goes beyond just making commitments — it's about executing them across the entire operation.

Innovating with green software

A key part of AVEVA's sustainability journey, according to Lisa, is their work on making software itself more sustainable.

AVEVA has joined forces with the Green Software Foundation to establish best practices for creating low-carbon software.

“When we looked, there weren’t many standards for low-carbon software, so we decided to take the lead,” Lisa reveals.

AVEVA is now testing its software against new sustainability parameters in two of its research and development centres.

Additionally, Lisa discusses how the transition to cloud computing offers great opportunities for sustainability but emphasised that green software goes beyond just cloud infrastructure.

AVEVA is focusing on optimising how and when data is processed, ensuring that data-intensive processes run during times when the grid is powered by cleaner energy.

“The grid isn’t green 24/7 yet, so we need to optimise for when it is,” she adds.

Lisa Wee, Global Head of Sustainability at AVEVA

Supporting the energy transition

Lisa is particularly enthusiastic when discussing how AVEVA's software is helping industrial customers — especially in the energy sector — drive their decarbonisation goals.

She outlins three key opportunities for the energy sector: decarbonising the existing energy system, scaling renewable energy deployment and addressing the challenge of managing renewable assets alongside traditional energy sources.

She cited bp as a prime example of how companies are leveraging AVEVA's digital tools to manage operations more efficiently while also reducing their carbon footprint.

"What we're seeing is that companies like bp are using the same solutions for compliance and sustainability that they previously used to optimise for profitability,” Lisa shares.

In terms of future energy technologies, Lisa mentions hydrogen, carbon capture and storage and small modular nuclear reactors as areas where digital twins — virtual replicas of physical assets — can help scale innovations more rapidly.

These technologies, while still expensive, offer significant promise for future energy systems.

By using digital analysis, companies can cut capital expenditure by up to 15% and reduce risk by as much as 50%.

To illustrate the power of digital twins, Lisa shares an example of a green hydrogen project where engineers are able to model weather patterns and other variables to optimise the plant’s design before construction even begins.

“At this stage, making changes is relatively inexpensive and digital twins allow us to experiment with different variables to find the best solution,” she explains.

Collaboration for the future

Lisa closes her talk by highlighting the need for greater collaboration across the industrial sector.

She spoke about the emergence of the 'connected industrial economy', where companies must break down silos to share data securely with stakeholders both inside and outside their own organisations.

“What we’re seeing is the creation of digital twins and packages of information that span the entire lifecycle of a project — from engineering to operations — creating new efficiencies,” Lisa says.

In the context of renewable energy, she references Z Global, a California-based company that has successfully built communities of information where data is shared in real time with stakeholders across the value chain. This new approach has significantly increased Z Global’s value to its customers by providing critical insights in near real-time.

Lisa ends by reiterating that digitalisation will be key in accelerating progress towards net zero and achieving broader goals around circularity and resilience.

Essential diary dates for 2024 and 2025…

Sustainability LIVE continues to expand its events with more to come in 2024 and 2025, discover our essential diary dates below.

2024 diary dates:

2025 diary dates: 

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