Are You on the Road to Decarbonization?

If you are, you are certainly looking at options for further electrification of many areas of the port and terminal operations, and overall business. Electrification is not necessarily THE solution for carbon net-zero, but it will indeed allow you to reduce the local carbon footprint.

Requirements for reducing the carbon footprint are coming from many directions that can affect port and terminal business. Often, it’s the companies or groups' own agenda that may consider decarbonization as part of their strategy. Or it could be regulations from port or government bodies that demand this.  Also, this often becomes part of concession agreements or part of the demand when applying for government funding or approaching automation projects.

Many parts of the port and terminal operations have already been employing proven solutions for years at the waterside for the STS cranes, the landside with rail cranes or the yard with electrified RMGs/RTGs. But horizontal transport is increasingly coming into the picture regarding electrification. Wherever additional requirements and the need to act on horizontal transport comes from, it will affect many parts of your business. It will not be enough if you just take it into consideration in execution and calculate more equipment needed because of charging cycles or just the operations duration of a battery-powered CHE with a diesel-powered one. Often in today´s operations, you will see for example, flat calculations made by port or terminal managers in which they say: “Just go for 20% more, then you’ll be good”.

This approach neglects not only the complexity that you add to the terminal operations, but also the variety of decisions you must take to electrify your operations. The choices you make will first impact the infrastructure you need to invest in, such as cables, substations, charging points, charging technologies, and software to manage the charging. Furthermore, there exist various dependencies between your operations mode, the charging strategies, and the possible equipment you have chosen. There is a distinct possibility that if a poor choice is taken that it may “fire-back” on your needed infrastructure in the terminal, which could look like the horizon equipment is running around in circles.

Last but not least all this will impact your equipment scheduling complexity in your day-to-day operation and your maintenance department.  With respect to the scheduling, your TOS (or whoever does the scheduling and dispatching) will also need to consider the charging strategies and charging options together with your upcoming operations. To be able to look ahead will be even more important than it is already in today's operations. Real-time decision-making on changes and real-time data integration will drive this part of the business.

To start solving the first loop in the planning process for electrification, you will need dynamic models that allow you to play different scenarios and evaluate them against each other. There is a good chance of more than one good scenario for your specific operations, but you will need to find it a layer deeper than what Excel tables can provide. You will need dynamic simulation scenarios that already consider the different possibilities in your charging options, equipment sections, terminal layout, and operational setup.  In addition to helping you make the right choices, it can also bring you a step forward in forecasting your energy consumption, which translates into your carbon footprint for different scenarios.

After plans are drawn and decisions are made, this must be rolled out and implemented in operations. You will need more data during operations, especially real-time data on equipment (CHE) status and power consumption. So, using standards like TIC4.0 #wetalktic is a must have to be able to have a flexible integration of different equipment into your digital environment. However, not only is having the data essential, but using it and creating value from this is even more critical. The TIC4.0 data can be seamlessly integrated with digital twin models of your terminal and real-time TOS solutions that use the data for better scheduling and dispatching during operations.

Conclusion: With the decision to fully electrify including horizontal transport, the complexity in decision-making and later operation is much higher than before because it will create more dependencies on manual and automated terminals. There is a need for more support on the journey towards port and terminal decarbonization as well as in the challenge of how to operate such setups. Decisions need to be supported more by data and analysis covering the whole process.