This year, we have already had the opportunity to work with two of the worlds largest car manufacturers. The assignment was clear in both cases: they set out to manufacture in ideally a carbon-free, but at least a carbon neutral way and they contracted us to explore on-site opportunities for carbon free or carbon neutral energy production for their plants.
It may be important at this point to make a clear distinction between carbon neutral and carbon free.
Carbon neutral means that an operation uses carbon, but you make all efforts to minimise and off-set carbon footprint. For this purpose, you may minimise your carbon inputs, the carbon generated in production, and finally, you neutralise the carbon contents of your output. This approach is a rather reactive one, assisting to progress incrementally – a choice you may pursue when locked into existing infrastructure and equipment.
Carbon free, however, is a pro-active approach more characteristic to newly established plants. It means that you make a decision to exclude carbon content as much as you can from the inputs of your operation, and as you do not have carbon in your input side, there is no risk that it will pop up in your output side. The key here is well-planned and closely monitored inputs, indeed.
This may seem easy to use carbon-free inputs, but trust us, it is not. Such exploration requires a clear picture of the plant operations, their input requirements and its spread in space and time, (i.e. the demand side) and also the physical potentials at the area of production, including geography, weather and infrastructure (i.e. the supply side).
If you narrow down your analysis to energy, it is still challenging to identify demand potentials, while it may be even more difficult for large manufacturers to disclose their needs. Should you have these two sides at hand, then comes the even more challenging task to align energy supply potentials to energy demand in a sustainable and secure way .
We, at DevEco, love such challenges. In both cases, the client was satisfied with what we have found and proposed, leading to actions that influence green transition significantly, globally. It is not a secret that solar energy plays an important role in such cases, but the bigger the plant and its energy demand, the more important geothermal energy utilisation becomes in the equations.
Energy storage is also an area to consider, assisting in the ongoing balancing exercise. This is another area where we have had the chance to add value recently – to be presented in a forthcoming post.
— The DevEco Consulting Team
(source of illustration: European Rubber Journal)
#carbonfree #car #manufacturing #carbonneutrality #solarenergy #geothermalenergy #DevEco