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The Digital Path To Sustainable Future Digital process integration and optimized energy efficiency hold key to a more sustainable global economy By Jean-PascalTricoire
s we all continue to adapt to the ‘New Normal’ and learning new ways to live, we all see that digitalization as the solution to make remote and collaborative operations possible, while strengthening our resiliency by allowing us to better understand, anticipate and adapt to change with greater agility. By enabling greater efficiency, at a much lower cost and with a much faster implementation, as well as better energy use and operational processes, it is also enabling a steep change in sustainability in everything we do. Digitalization has disrupted the way we live together, and it is now disrupting the way we live with our environment—by enabling us to bridge progress and sustainability together. Just as Internet had dramatically changed the way people live and work together, the new Internet of Things that connects machines to machines will completely disrupt our current notions of efficiency and sustainability. Thanks to large data centers, we have a multiplication of Big Data and AI (artificial intelligence) that can be used to have machines training other machines digitally, with massive amounts of data generated through digitalization. This creates a virtuous circle, where digitalization also lays foundation for managing a much more desirable future for all of us. Just as cellphones became smart phones, buildings are becoming ‘smart buildings,’ the industry is moving to ‘smart’ manufacturing,’ and cities’ infrastructures are moving to the ‘smart city’ model. And it seems intuitive that the world would be massively more electric, with
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28 CANADIANPACKAGING · December 2020
Schneider Electric’s chief execitive officer Jean-Pascal Tricoire (right) deilvering a powerful keynote address at the company’s virtual forum on digital innovation last month, highlighting the company’s strong focus on process digitlization and energy efficiency.
It’s about renewable energy, especially solar energy. It’s about decentralized micro-grid; it’s about the possibility to create net zero-carbon buildings; it’s about using solar panels or wind farms to power electric cars. Saving energy resources is good for our planet and for our companies’ bottom lines, and if we can leverage digital efficiency to achieve much better energy efficiency in every building and every manufacturing plant out there, we can “We have seen a achieve new levels of efficiency at new massive difference in building and manufacturing operations at much lower cost point, while increasing the resilience levels of the rate of retrofits of existing installacompanies that had tions. The biggest problem is not new prodigitized their processes jects: it is the existing stock of buildings and those who have not” and manufacturing instillations that we need to digitize in order to become more Some would say that electricity is not energy-efficient in everything we do.. While living with COVID-19 has made a new technology, but it’s not about electhings painful for all of us, it has forced us tricity as we know it. the best example being this ongoing mass migration in the direction of electric cars in the next 10 years. But the biggest migration for electricity down the road will be in buildings. In many countries around the world, building are still using fossil fuels for their heating functions, and it will take a massive effort to see them moved to renewable electricity.
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