Cherif Assaf doesn’t beat about the bush. He’s talking about the port--the port of Singapore. It was there, says the Egyptian-born engineer, that it all began. “I was hired by the Port of Singapore. In the 1980s-1990s, it was the mainstay of the Singapore economy,” begins the director of the Nanyang Technological University-Energy Research Institute, before broadening the context to allow people in Luxembourg to get a good understanding of how this country--three times smaller than the grand duchy and ten times more populous--works.

“Singapore has been much more advanced than many other countries in the world for some time now. In particular, they have had a decarbonisation and electrification strategy for years. A strategy based on artificial intelligence. And, above all, a strategy that consists of being as self-sufficient as possible in energy, because everything is linked,” explains the former VP of Schneider Electric and director of Philips Lighting. “In a world where there are not enough engineers, the question was how to decarbonise and electrify as efficiently and quickly as possible.”

“Singapore is very proud of its capabilities but doesn’t launch any projects if there isn’t a direct financial payback,” says the engineer. “Singapore is run like a business. They have no debt. They even have S$600bn [€428bn] in their sovereign wealth fund. Just below the prime minister, there is a ‘prime minister’s office,’ the place where the major businesses--energy, finance, etc.--come together on the one hand, and technology on the other. This means that for each project we can say: what skills do I need, what companies should I support, what technologies should I promote? If you look at the profiles of the ministers, you’ll see very competent ministers who have solid backgrounds and understand the subjects.”

$18m in research and development

And then, slowly, the subject narrows. “Looking ahead to 2050, they want to know what their best energy mix will be: it will be renewable, nuclear, gas and other sources typical of Singapore, such as geothermal, because at 800 metres below ground, there are high temperatures,” says Assaf. Once they had that, they wanted to know how to decarbonise their ecosystem. They needed to target the major energy-consuming infrastructures, such as ports and airports.

In Singapore, 120,000 ships have to be loaded and unloaded every year. Then there are the new towns, the major polluters such as oil, and the players in the pharmaceutical sector, such as Novartis. They have demanded that these sectors be decarbonised. Then, to compensate, they had to think about electrification. So they introduced a tax, which you have to pay before you buy a car, of $130,000 for a petrol car compared with $80,000 for an electric car. The switchover is happening immediately.

However, infrastructure also needs to be built to recharge electric cars. For its seven million inhabitants, Singapore needs 100,000 chargers. Fast chargers, because if everyone had to charge at home, it would put a strain on the network. But for 100,000 chargers of between 50 and 300KW, you also need to know how to manage the network. You have to have good software and a good system for managing the electricity grid, so that it’s flexible enough to respond to needs. Then, if today we produce electricity and consume some of it, we need to be able to store what we don’t consume for the times when we need it, while allowing those who finance the infrastructure to have a good view of electricity prices at all times, otherwise they’ll go bankrupt.

The Singapore programme cost $18m in research and development. And it has been tested on various infrastructures, he explains, including Amazon’s. “And Amazon’s involvement is crucial because it is a very large consumer of energy and its consumption is increasing by 12% a year, and with artificial intelligence, we don’t yet know how far that will go...”

“So let’s go back to the calculator. If the consumption of these players is multiplied by five and each data centre consumes 1GW, i.e., half the output of a nuclear power station, Singapore has realised that it would have a very big problem in the short term. It therefore required Amazon to make a major effort to decarbonise, in other words to do two things: monitor its emissions and find ways of reducing them. So, if you think that zero carbon is science fiction, Singapore has set up a green ammonia plant and this has made it possible to produce hydrogen. Amazon built a prototype to use this hydrogen... and got the idea. A second project was launched to capture carbon and use it to cool buildings. Instead of Freon, we used this product to cool and it reduced carbon production by 60% while using the other, transformed!”

Three ISO and Veritas standards, the real differentiator

“And that’s where it gets interesting: if you want to reduce your footprint, you have to think ahead. And statistical methods are not enough to get close enough to the final truth. You have to use probabilistic methods and artificial intelligence. The stochastic approach enables us to make short-term probabilistic projections, with a success rate of 80%,” says the engineer.

“Let’s take an example,” says his partner in Evercomm EMEA, Sascha Bremer. “You have a swimming pool to heat. It can use electricity, solar panels, a heat pump, sometimes several of these technologies that you have to navigate between. Sometimes the sun is enough. But to optimise pool heating, you need to know how much each source can produce and how they can combine with each other.”

“We have set up a platform for determining a company’s carbon footprint,” says Assaf. “But instead of endless discussions, we have decided to use three ISO standards: 14064, 14067 and 14068. And if the discussions are complicated, it’s because many companies have marketed products linked to their development that are not up to standard, and now it would be too expensive to bring everything up to standard. We then had our platform certified by Veritas. The second layer we then developed is a ‘net-zero’ tool. The tool plans the energy transition by modelling the energy systems. Whatever the devices in a company or an entity, we can model these elements.”

“We have already integrated 6,500 of them, taking the best on the market and the biggest sellers in each category,” continues Assaf. “The company can then calculate the best plan for emitting as little carbon as possible, sometimes using different scenarios at the same time. The tool enables carbon emissions to be reduced by up to 40% and everything to be planned out for up to ten years. At the same time, it allows you to prepare your investments to buy new technologies that will have time to pay for themselves, and so on. Companies like Shell, Amazon and Novartis use our tool.”

Nova! the next logical step

The Evercomm solution--partly owned by Mitsubishi, for whom it also works--is therefore a platform with three products: NXmap (for mapping emissions from scopes 1, 2 and 3), NXops (for monitoring energy efficiency and carbon footprint) and NXplan (for implementing a strategy, especially in terms of capex and opex investments).

Named as one of the three most promising greentech companies at Cop28 in Dubai, Evercomm remains closely linked to the state of Singapore. In association with the country’s central bank, it is continuing to develop a prototype that will speak to Luxembourg: its technology will help banks leverage artificial intelligence when issuing sustainability-related loans in the real estate sector, thus establish greenwashing (currently estimated at 50% of loans), truly measure sustainability performance and enable bank relationship managers, KYC teams and sustainable finance units to quickly, automatically and accurately extract sustainability information, such as a company’s total greenhouse gas emissions, from a variety of sources.

This article was originally published in .