October 14, 2024 A Decarbonization Path Forward for Utilities

European firms should adopt industrial decarbonization strategies to meet stricter energy standards and enhance infrastructure resilience.

By Marco Tellarini, Group Senior Vice President, Head of EMEA Region, ABB Electrification Service

Amid the introduction of the European Union’s Green Deal Industrial Plan and renewed Energy Efficiency Directive, European firms now have to meet higher energy and infrastructure standards while battling greater public scrutiny for their carbon emission records. At an operational level, firms across the board, especially utilities, face the challenge of maintaining robust, reliable services while transitioning to more sustainable operations. The key to navigating this complex landscape lies in embracing industrial decarbonization strategies. By adopting a holistic strategy that focuses on modernizing assets and leveraging digital technologies, operators can enhance infrastructure resilience, achieve significant cost savings, and significantly reduce their energy and carbon footprint.

Achieving Carbon and Cost Reduction through Asset Modernization

One of the greatest opportunities for carbon and cost savings lies in upgrading outdated components. Modernizing existing electrical components and equipment to boost their operating efficiency while ensuring they can last longer mitigates the likelihood of failure and reduces the risk of downtime. Upgrading outdated components can reduce the cost of operating equipment by a third and extend its lifecycle by as much as 30 years. This results in enormous energy savings for businesses.

In fact, 50 percent of electrical equipment like metal cabinets, steel plates and busbars — products with high carbon footprints — can be used perpetually without being replaced if outdated components such as switchgear and circuit breakers are regularly monitored, maintained, and eventually, upgraded. Such modernization efforts can extend the lifespan of the products, reducing capital expenditure and minimizing resource consumption.
As such, by actively seeking out opportunities to retrofit dated components with technological upgrades, utilities can achieve improved grid resilience with greater ease, speed, and environmental performance. The result? A win-win situation, both to one’s bottom line and for the planet. 

Bringing a Strategic View to Data-Driven Predictive Maintenance

Rather than running a piece of equipment to the point of failure, utilities should deploy a proactive, predictive maintenance approach that uses real-time data analytics. This helps to monitor and evaluate when a piece of equipment might need upgrading before it happens, reducing downtime and total cost of ownership. Replacements are therefore only done when they are absolutely necessary which reduces waste.

We see this best among early adopters of the predictive maintenance approach.
By replacing older, non-digital circuit breakers with more intelligent breakers, linked up to an advanced monitoring system, some facilities have improved their energy capacity by up to 20% and reduced their operational costs by up to 30%.

Furthermore, this helps utility operators prevent potential hazards before they even arise, enabling them to plan for maintenance, which maximizes the equipment’s utility and reduces the carbon emissions associated with making a new component purchase, all while keeping costly downtime to a minimum. Electric grids, for instance, can become more robust and capable of quicker responses to outages. This can be facilitated by better use of fault detection, isolation, and restoration technologies as part of a predictive maintenance strategy.

Embedding Resilience for a more Confident, Greener Future

Ultimately, the goal of improving green infrastructure is a whole-of-organization endeavor which requires the entire firm to decarbonize. This could mean digitizing the firm’s entire assets to create digital twins for remote monitoring, analysis and repair, while also seeking to enhance energy efficiency by ensuring that assets are operating at an optimal level.

Such an industrial decarbonization strategy benefits firms twofold — it reduces environmental impact while boosting operational resilience. This is especially critical as businesses weigh the pros and cons of transitioning fully to renewable energy sources. Ensuring the reliability of their underlying infrastructure will help to increase the willingness to adopt green technologies. 

The Way Forward

A sustainable, decarbonized future for utilities is not only an environmental imperative but a strategic necessity — one that will ultimately result in operators futureproofing themselves for the long term.

The path to industrial decarbonisation is paved with opportunities for innovation, cost optimization, and enhanced sustainability. Utility companies that proactively adopt these strategies will not only meet evolving regulatory and societal expectations but also stand to set themselves apart as leaders in a greener economy. The future of utilities lies within the ability to be different — to think long-term, be creative, and come up with holistic solutions that take care of our planet, economy, and society.

About the Author
Marco Tellarini has been Senior Vice President – EMEA Region for ABB Electrification Service since April 2022.  With over three decades of engineering expertise, Marco has built a strong reputation for his leadership in technology, product management and business management.

Marco has held several global and local business leadership roles across EMEA, Asia, and at ABB’s global headquarters in Switzerland. Throughout his tenure in the business, Marco continues to play an instrumental role in growing the ABB Electrification business across key markets internationally. 

His global mandates included leading the Medium and Low Voltage Switchgear Product Group for six years from 2016. Prior to this, he headed the Distribution Automation Product Group business for five years.  Between 2010 and 2016, Marco was based in Asia, where he served as Vice President and Head of the Local Business Unit for Medium Voltage Products for ABB China and as Executive Vice President for Power Products at ABB Korea prior to that. His roles have consistently involved collaboration with management teams to shape strategic decisions in the electrification landscape. 

Marco holds a Master’s Degree with Honors in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, along with management and leadership certifications from INSEAD, IMD, and SDA Bocconi.

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