Alibaba Cloud Launches Carbon Management Solution Energy Expert
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced on Thursday the global launch of Energy Expert, a sustainability platform to help customers measure, analyze and manage the carbon emissions of their business activities and products around the world. The software-as-a-service offerings also provide actionable insights and energy saving recommendations to help customers accelerate their sustainability journeys.
The initiative is aligned with Alibaba’s carbon neutrality pledge, which was unveiled last year. The company pioneered the “Scope 3 +” concept and has pledged to share its energy efficient technologies with its customers and business partners, uniting them in the collective effort to reduce carbon footprints.
“Energy Expert is designed to help companies achieve their carbon neutrality goals through advanced technologies and streamlined solutions,” said Chen Lijuan, General Manager of Product and Solutions at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Energy Expert helps customers automate their carbon accounting and reporting process at a corporate and product level, and obtain real-time sustainability impact statistics to make more informed decisions. The platform enables customers to identify the sources of the carbon emissions from their daily business activities as well as the full life cycle of their products based on the PAS 2060 and ISO 14064 standards on carbon neutrality.
Customers can also quantify their carbon footprint through a prebuilt calculation model and leverage public emission factors datasets and Energy Expert’s proprietary datasets. Additionally, it provides visibility into their real-time carbon emission patterns and the progress of their sustainability performance through visualizations on dashboards and online reports.
In addition, the solution provides extensive analytics on energy efficiency and emission forecasts through deep learning-based AI models hosted on Alibaba Cloud. To help customers minimize their overall environmental impact, Energy Expert also offers actionable optimization plans with recommendations that balances business growth and environmental impacts. These can include increasing the use of clean energy, reducing excessive electricity consumption during peak times, and optimizing supply chains ranging from sourcing materials to shipping products.
Energy Expert also works with recognized industrial organizations worldwide such as TÜV Rheinland to provide authoritative online carbon footprint accounting and certification, helping customers to easily validate and communicate their energy saving progress with stakeholders.
In China, the innovation was deployed in February this year. So far, it has served over 2,000 companies and has generated an energy savings of over 2 million kilowatt hours per day, or a reduction of 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions since February.
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Energy Expert also played a key role in the sustainability measures implemented at Alibaba’s Xixi headquarters in Hangzhou. With the platform’s energy saving proposals – such as the intelligent control of the air-conditioning system and the installation of roof-top solar energy panels that produce 1.2 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year – the solution has helped optimize energy efficiency at the company’s headquarters and has so far reduced power consumption by 30% during non-peak times and saved 17% of air-conditioning energy use in the summer.
