CO2-optimized production

In order to advance CO2-opti­mized indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion, the tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Siemens and Bay­Wa decid­ed to work togeth­er. As part of a pilot project, the two com­pa­nies are com­bin­ing Sigreen, Siemens’ soft­ware for emis­sions man­age­ment, with Bay­Wa Car­bon Con­nect, BayWa’s soft­ware for emis­sions offsetting.

In the future, this will help indus­tri­al enter­pris­es under­stand prod­uct-spe­cif­ic emis­sions across the sup­ply chain and all the way to their off­set­ting. The first step is iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a product’s real car­bon foot­print across the sup­ply chain using Sigreen, after which mea­sures are derived for avoid­ing CO2 and, final­ly, emis­sions that are cur­rent­ly unavoid­able are off­set by pur­chas­ing CO2 cer­tifi­cates from trust­ed cli­mate pro­tec­tion projects via Bay­Wa Car­bon Con­nect. Only projects that store CO2 – for exam­ple, in bio­mass or humus – are select­ed for the joint pilot project.

Uni­form qual­i­ty stan­dards for cli­mate pro­tec­tion projects

The com­bi­na­tion of the two soft­ware solu­tions will make it pos­si­ble to for­ward infor­ma­tion on emis­sions off­set­ting projects across the sup­ply chain to oth­er com­pa­nies with­out restrict­ing the data sov­er­eign­ty of sup­pli­ers and sub-sup­pli­ers. This pro­vides a dig­i­tal means for defin­ing and incor­po­rat­ing uni­form qual­i­ty stan­dards for emis­sions off­set­ting projects with­in a company’s own sup­ply chain. In the future, this will inform man­u­fac­tur­ers of whether their sup­pli­ers’ prod­ucts have been off­set and with what projects.

“The declared vision of this joint pilot project is a con­sis­tent, end-to-end process that is reli­able and cer­ti­fied, from the gen­er­a­tion of unavoid­able car­bon emis­sions to the ulti­mate removal of these emis­sions from the atmos­phere,” says Dr. Gunter Beitinger, SVP Man­u­fac­tur­ing, Fac­to­ry Dig­i­tal­iza­tion and Sigreen at Siemens and Chair­per­son of the Estaini­um Association.

“Until now, the lack of trans­paren­cy has meant that com­pa­nies have been unable to ful­ly trust the neu­tral­iza­tion and com­pen­sa­tion mea­sures of their own sup­ply chain. I believe that by com­bin­ing Bay­Wa Car­bon Con­nect and Sigreen, we’ve paved the way for uni­form qual­i­ty stan­dards with­in the sup­ply chain, and in this way have tak­en a trans­for­ma­tive step toward cred­i­ble emis­sions off­set­ting in indus­try,” says Stef­fen Win­kler, Busi­ness Unit Lead of IT Prod­ucts and Ser­vices at Bay­Wa and Head of Bay­Wa Car­bon Services.

Spe­cif­ic use case at the Siemens factory 

Siemens is pre­sent­ing a spe­cif­ic use case based on its own pro­duc­tion in Amberg, Ger­many: For the dura­tion of the project – from Jan­u­ary 1, 2023, to Decem­ber 31, 2023 – the com­pa­ny is off­set­ting the car­bon emis­sions that have been gen­er­at­ed by the pro­duc­tion of select­ed prod­ucts from the Simat­ic S7-1500 con­troller fam­i­ly. This takes into account emis­sions from the sup­ply chain to the fac­to­ry gate (“cra­dle-to- gate”). Dur­ing the peri­od from 2015 to 2022, the Elec­tron­ics Works Amberg demon­stra­bly reduced its CO2 by 49 per­cent and set its sights on becom­ing CO2- neu­tral by 2026. A vari­ety of mea­sures are being used to reduce emis­sions from the sup­ply chain. For exam­ple, Siemens is rely­ing on the use of sus­tain­able mate­ri­als and on coop­er­a­tion with sup­pli­ers to reduce prod­uct-spe­cif­ic car­bon foot­prints. In 2023, the fac­to­ry received the Sus­tain­abil­i­ty Award from the World Eco­nom­ic Forum.

Sigreen

With Sigreen, Siemens is already enabling its cus­tomers to iden­ti­fy and share infor­ma­tion on prod­uct-spe­cif­ic emis­sions across entire sup­ply chains based on real data. This allows pro­duc­ing com­pa­nies to quan­ti­fy the effec­tive­ness of mea­sures to use renew­able ener­gies, save resources, and short­en trans­porta­tion routes across the val­ue chain. To improve the reli­a­bil­i­ty of data, Siemens relies on cryp­to­graph­ic keys and the inclu­sion of inde­pen­dent cer­ti­fi­ca­tion bod­ies. Sigreen belongs to the open, inter­op­er­a­ble Siemens Xcel­er­a­tor portfolio.

Bay­Wa Car­bon Connect

The Bay­Wa Car­bon Con­nect soft­ware is the dig­i­tal arm of the Bay­Wa Car­bon Ser­vices Busi­ness Unit, which helps com­pa­nies com­bine com­pre­hen­sive cli­mate man­age­ment with reli­able emis­sions off­set­ting, sup­port­ed by dig­i­tal­iza­tion. This means that cli­mate pro­tec­tion projects have to meet cer­tain qual­i­ty cri­te­ria, such as those relat­ed to the type of cli­mate pro­tec­tion tech­nol­o­gy, the trace­abil­i­ty of the emis­sions reduc­tion, project size, or project loca­tion, in order to be added to the port­fo­lio. This makes them trans­par­ent and cred­i­ble. Projects imple­ment­ed by Bay­Wa are eval­u­at­ed and mon­i­tored via remote sens­ing and indi­vid­ual project mea­sures are doc­u­ment­ed in Bay­Wa Car­bon Con­nect. Bay­Wa Car­bon Con­nect can exchange data on the acquired neu­tral­iza­tion and com­pen­sa­tion projects with oth­er soft­ware sys­tems via dig­i­tal inter­faces. The reg­is­ter accessed by Bay­Wa Car­bon Ser­vices ensures that CO2 cer­tifi­cates are not claimed mul­ti­ple times.

Dur­ing the pilot project, data inter­faces were designed and cli­mate pro­tec­tion projects were select­ed in close coop­er­a­tion with the Estaini­um Asso­ci­a­tion. With this col­lab­o­ra­tion, Siemens and Bay­Wa are sup­port­ing the association’s vision of achiev­ing the net zero goals of the indus­tri­al sec­tor with the aid of dig­i­tal technologies.