The "Climate bOWL" innovation project kicked off this year's webinar series "Inside it's OWL" of the Ostwestfallen-Lippe Cluster of Excellence on 1 February. The project consortium was represented in the one-hour webinar by Waliuollah Ali from NTT DATA Business Solutions AG and project coordinator Dr Florian Schlosser from Paderborn University. The presentation of the digital solution approach for an intelligent assistance system for the holistic recording and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions was followed by an exchange on drivers and challenges for companies on the path to climate neutrality. The basis for this was an interactive survey of participants, most of whom came from the manufacturing industry.
The biggest drivers for climate management turned out to be the rise in energy prices coupled with stricter customer requirements. For example, it emerged from the discussion that customer requirements for climate neutrality of products are increasing, which is also leading to a reduction in energy costs through energy efficiency. Furthermore, the customer requirements on the climate protection side have increased in importance to the extent that without the pursuit and realisation of CO2 reduction targets, credit and investment worthiness would decrease.
On the one hand, the need to actively drive forward climate protection measures due to the large number of drivers was emphasised, while on the other hand, the challenges of holistic CO2 balancing and the development of reduction measures were expressed. The biggest hurdles in greenhouse gas accounting, which is still largely carried out manually, are currently the time-consuming data collection and limited data availability. This is where the digital assistance system would like to come in, in order to ensure the described requirements are met with reduced resource expenditure through standardised data collection. Finally, as a result of the survey, automatic data collection and increasing the transparency of product-specific CO2 emissions were identified as the most important specifications of the assistance system to be developed. The companies also wanted digital support in identifying efficiency potential and the automated creation of a roadmap on the way to climate neutrality.
The project consortium would like to thank "it's OWL" for organising the webinar and all participants for their active participation and exchange, which will prove helpful for the further development of the assistance system.