Photos: Australian industry explores data for net zero

“We have a once in a generation opportunity to accelerate our industry’s digital transformation,” said IoT Alliance Australia CEO Frank Zeichner at the IoT Impact conference at UTS in Sydney on June 13, 2024.

Organisations working in the water, energy, construction, infrastructure, government, logistics, mining, public transport, manufacturing, aquaculture and other domains attended the event to share and learn about harnessing sensors, data, cloud and in some cases AI to achieve impact, including to help track progress to climate targets.

Speakers laid out the need for better data, and use of that data, to help Australian organisations achieve sustainability goals and improve productivity.

Rather than creating better estimates of data, Pathzero is “essentially building a car to connect institutional asset owners with fund managers who manage their capital and having those fund managers disclose those emissions to the fund manager,” said the company's CEO Carl Prins.

“That's quite important in today's world, where greenwashing and litigation risk becomes a real issue for institutional asset owners, because essentially, it places the responsibility for disclosure to the fund manager.”

“That disclosure of responsibility then drives the fund manager to want to create better data and manage the risk of making an incorrect disclosure.”

John Mottram is cofounder of WollemAI, which uses a variety of data and machine learning to calculate climate scores for large agricultural portfolios on demand.

“We're effectively quantifying climate and nature values in agricultural enterprises,” Mottram said.

“The reporting provides a comprehensive set of measurements for portfolios of 10,000 plus assets down to each individual at the farm level, a comprehensive set of measurements of the positive emissions, … the negative side of emissions (carbon removals from the atmosphere), …a measurement of the land use change [and] a measurement of the carbon stock of the land, the trees, the pasture, etc.”

“Achieving our net zero targets, competing locally and globally for finance and investment in a greenhouse gas sensitive market and setting up a low carbon economy will need data,” said IoT Alliance Australia CEO, Frank Zeichner. “That data will need to be trusted and timely and shared safely.”

“Gearing up our data collecting, processing and sharing capacity and capability to meet these needs and more is utterly critical for Australia if we want to meet our targets let alone be a clean tech and energy leader, which is our aspiration."

Romilly Madew (Engineers Australia)

Consult Australia’s Jonathan Cartledge spoke about Australia’s 16th place world ranking in capacity and readiness to use digital technologies, and the billions of dollars in infrastructure projects around Australia being delivered with paper plans and PDFs, while acknowledging the sector’s increasingly complex risk environment.

Cartledge saw “great digital initiatives occurring in infrastructure and construction across Australia”, but commented that “digital assets are too rarely used to their full potential as projects are delivered”.

“We need scale and we need a networked approach,” to drive a ‘digital by default’ approach to infrastructure, he said.

“A relatively small government investment, we think, could build new capability, skills, and perhaps most critically, relationships that harness what we're doing in that best practise to see it coordinated with investment strategy.”

Representatives from industry and government have “agreed there is a need for coordinated leadership at a national level to drive digital by default in infrastructure, a new digital alliance coordinating and resourcing that networked approach. Not another agency or another bureaucracy, but a mechanism to build national capability and coordination between government and industry.”

Jason Berryman, Government and SaaS Specialist, AVEVA, spoke about "Unlocking industrial intelligence for a net zero future".

Michael Blumenstein (UTS)

From left: Jerome Bowen (Adaptus), Sam Sneddon (WollemAI) Kurt Winter (Carbon Market Institute), Judy Anderson (IoT Alliance Australia)

Judy Anderson (IoT Alliance Australia)

From left: Swaroop Tulsidas (CSIRO), Dr Eliza Middleton (University of Sydney), Rayne van den Berg (NatCap+), Derryn Heilbuth (BWD Strategic)

Rayne van den Berg (NatCap+)

Dr Eliza Middleton (University of Sydney)

Swaroop Tulsidas (CSIRO)

Left to right: Sam Nelson (Pleiades), Max Girault (Inauro)

From left: Mark Atkinson (Telstra), Luke Menzel (Energy Efficiency Council), Dani Alexander (UNSW Energy Institute), Gavin Dietz (Wattwatchers).

Mark Atkinson (Telstra)

Dani Alexander (UNSW Energy Institute)

From left: Darren Kane (nbn Australia), Kumesh Naidoo (UTS), Julio Del Cid (Holmes Institute), Claire Ripley (Standards Australia), George Bou-Rizk (Genesys Electronics Design), Frank Zeichner (IoTAA)