NBS Knowledge Lab Webinar: Implementing Sustainable Practices in the Digital Era

During the webinar, panellists Ms Abhiruchi Gadgil, Program Manager of Integration and Energy Management, ENGIE Lab Singapore, Ms Eugenia Koh, Global Head of Sustainable Finance, Wealth, and Retail Banking, Standard Chartered, and François Balland, CPO Air Lab, Thales Aerospace, shared insights on current business models and digital strategies that promote a healthier planet and stronger organisational resilience. Moderating the session was Assistant Professor Ben Choi, NBS’s Division of Information Technology & Operations Management.

The following is an edited transcript:

Ben Choi: Our first segment of the discussion is about sustainable practices. Sustainability has become the spotlight, in Singapore. We may have heard or read about the Long Island project that the government is going to invest a lot of money to basically creating additional pieces of land as a long-term protection for a little tiny island that could be under some threats, especially when there's global warming or environmental changes.

I would like to ask our panellist Abhi to share with us any additional insights or based on your experience with regards to issues such as sustainable practices, be it any events that are related to your job scope or any other current events that you are basically invest into as well. Abhi please.

Abhiruchi Gadgil: Thanks Ben for the question. I’m fortunately working with a firm which is in the forefront of implementing the sustainable practices and sustainable technologies. I'll give you a brief overview of how we approach it as a firm as well. We are divided into four global business units. Essentially so, there is one on renewables which essentially does large-scale renewable installation for different clients of ours. It could be for a particular use case for on-site utilities, or it could be large-scale deployment as well. There is a large demand as the grid takes more and more renewables, there's obviously a huge need for batteries and battery related research as well as battery related implementation. So, we have a business unit which takes care of the flexible generation and flexible topics in which we need the grid and the battery support as well.

We have here, in Singapore, primarily business unit which works for energy solutions. It is essentially pre-packaged solutions which take into account a lot of different sustainable solutions together to optimise the solution and give it to the client essentially. We have businesses around mostly relate to electrons which we are talking about the renewable electricity. We also work in gases, which is also one of the topics to be considered in sustainability and sustainable practice moving forward for the industry where we are trying to implement green gases, so it's sort of a holistic portfolio to include a lot of sustainability related issues and trying to look at it comprehensively. As a company looks at it in a technology agnostic way, what we're trying to do is to bring a lot of sustainable solutions together, trying to see which is the best, putting them together and offering it for different clients or different services. We have ambitious targets, so digital solutions also come into picture to solve all of them. And I'm sure we'll have more discussion around that as well.

Ben Choi: That is very interesting to me because I don't think I know a lot about chemistry and petrochemicals. So you mentioned about green gases, how is it different from any other kind of gases we are using now?

Abhiruchi Gadgil: We are creating gases through green routes. For example, if you want to create ammonia instead of doing it by the conventional processes which are based on fossil fuels, we try to get green hydrogen. We make that green hydrogen through water and combine it to make the E ammonia what we would call and that could be potentially used in, for example, maritime application. The idea here is to go all the way green by making the processes green. Right now, the status is in a research phase and a little bit of an implementation phase as well. We are trying to think about creating green supply chains which do not exist. The idea of green gases to make the reliance on fossil fuels much lesser.

Ben Choi: Thank you very much for teaching me about that and that sounds like a perfect linkage to our next panellist Eugenia. We talk about green chemicals, green gases and try to remove the carbon footprint as much as possible. I may be understanding it wrong so correct me if that's the case. Please share with us with regards to any finance-related or bank-related sustainable practices that you have been exposed to and let us learn about that.

Eugenia Koh: In banking, there are two big errors. We finance a lot of these green practices. What Abhi was talking about, we've been looking quite a bit at green hydrogen as an example. I think what is interesting is a lot of these technologies while they are quite nascent, but they're also growing quite exponentially. And increasingly, a lot of it is also becoming more and more bankable.

What's interesting for Singapore, bringing it to the Singapore context is that if you think about the big trends in sustainability. We are also quite a big bunkering hub. We have been seeing also within the small to medium enterprises a growth of businesses. For instance, looking at processing used cooking oil which then can be used to produce sustainable biofuels, and I think as a bank, we come in to see how we can support some of that financing and how we can also partner clients in thinking about it. What is also important to highlight is that it is not just about the green businesses, a lot of businesses are in very traditional sectors, be it in manufacturing or in cement and how then do you get started. I think one very practical way in which businesses have started thinking about is to just look at energy efficiency. So, simple things from being able to change your light bulbs to more led lighting can qualify a green loan for instance, which then allows you to start pivoting your business in small ways. You could be a small-medium enterprise, or a big corporate getting started, it’s about picking the low hanging fruits and then thinking about how you can get to the next step of decarbonising, as one very practical step that we see our clients do and we work with them in terms of how we can come in to finance. Some of that pivot as well, for us broadly as a bank, Standard Chartered has a big presence across emerging markets. My coverage is across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. And I think we're quite passionate about the fact that we need the whole economy to transition. As we continue to support all the green businesses, how can we really help the brown get to the green and how can we think about transition in a real tangible way from the technologies that can help businesses’ transition, but also for them to tap into the financing because there is a clear trillion-dollar gap in financing the transition. It involves everyone coming together to help move the entire society around so that we can get to net zero.

Ben Choi: Fantastic, Eugenia. Thank you very much for telling us about green financing, supporting this green transformation in Asia and beyond. Just a very quick follow-up questions, you mentioned about Asia and within southeast Asia for example in particular which I think a lot of our audience are from. Basically, there's a huge diversity be it economic progress, development as well as the kind of business activities that each of these countries are into. To this end considering this diversity with regards to financing for green transformation, and you know conversion and so on, do you see any challenges as well as opportunities? Let us know.

Eugenia Koh: Yes, for sure. I think you know, some of the challenges still include the cost of technology and where the regulatory support is. What's encouraging though is across Southeast Asia, you see that governments have made net zero commitments and it is the net zero commitments of both countries as well as companies that is driving a lot of that shift towards sustainability and sustainable practices. But I think in the market there is more guidance that some of the companies are looking for which would then help them consider making that pivot. The cost of technology is definitely something that still remains a bearer. If I take the steel industry, for instance, if you look at green steel, the technologies involved in being able to achieve green steel is still very expensive for a lot of the top steel producers. For instance, in Indonesia. Coal is one that is controversial, I think what's encouraging about coal is that Singapore and the MAS has quite a bit of thought leadership around how we can help with the cold transition and from an opportunity perspective. There is the area of carbon credits and the latest being transition credits, which is if you can help a coal plant commit to an early decommission which really affects many of our coal companies in the region, then they can qualify to be incentivised with transition credits. The MAS has said that they can be an off taker of those credits. I think carbon markets is an area to watch as well, very relevant for Indonesia and for Malaysia. We work with many of our private banking clients who might own land agriculture to think about how they can also look at carbon markets as an additional revenue stream for their businesses they are currently already working on.

Ben Choi: Thank you very much for the tip in terms of where the growth opportunities are going to be. And Franc, earlier we have talked about the chemical side of things which is about production of energy sources. Eugenia shared with us with regards to the financing part on the bank's involvement in terms of propelling those transformation. Now, our audience probably also know this very well. Singapore is air hub; basically, aerospace industry is certainly one of the main pillars for our GDP growth as well as creating a lot of jobs around this area in terms of aerospace. Share with us what do you see in terms of sustainable practices, its implications, its impact, and properly some potential.

Francois Balland: I think you pitch it very well. The aerospace industry is not only allowing traffic of passengers and shipments, but it's also leading the way to the whole industry, to the ecosystem in Singapore and wider Asia Pacific. I wanted to take this time to give you a glimpse into this very interesting industry which has obviously a lot of implications with regards to net zero and sustainability targets.

Aviation is responsible for about 3% of global CO₂ emissions so that's quite significant. The issue or the roadmap forward is that we expect the number of passengers going to double in the next 20 years, so reducing the number of flights is actually not really the option or the scenario that we foresee even though perhaps we try to as travellers and passengers reduce the number of flights that we do personally and professionally, it's still expected to double in the next 20 years. With that given, we need to find ways to decrease the impact of aviation in order to meet the net zero targets for 2050.

Aviation is known as a hard to bait sector. It's mainly due to the high energy density that is required, you need a lot of energy to fly from point A to point B. The big hit at the highest impact is on your long-haul flights. Regional aviation is not short hauls or relatively low impact, whereas your long hauls is really where you have your big hits, as we call it. To give you an idea flying from Paris to Singapore, if you take a medium or heavy carrier, it's going to use about 100 metric tons of jet fuel that will emit about 300 tons of CO₂. And that's just one flight, 300 tons of CO₂. Then maybe you know how many flights we have a day, and the number is mind boggling. All these flights are not long haul, but we have roughly on average about 100,000 flights in every given day, 100,000. You can't multiply this 100,000 by 100 tons, because they're not all long-haul flights. But you get the idea that there's obviously a huge amount of CO₂ and jet fuel burn due to everyday flights. So how can we mitigate this footprint? This is really the challenges posed to the aviation sector. There are basically three ways to reduce the impact of aviation, and we need to work on all three of these sectors. All these approaches to reduce CO₂ emissions of the aviation sector. I'll give you the list of these three approaches and explain how each can be approached, what are the advantages and downsides for each one.

The first way to address it is through the propulsion means. We have different approaches, either we go to electric or hydrogen power aviation or we change the type of jet fuel that we use. The second type is optimisation on the fleet modernisation, which means that we use more recent aircraft to get a performance gain in terms of efficiency, so we tap into some savings there. The third approach is through operational improvements, basically changing how efficient air traffic can be. Let me dive into these three, one by one. The propulsion means the fleet and the operations. In terms of propulsion, I mentioned about electric and hydrogen aviation. The main downsides are the technology is very nascent and we're still very far away from having long-haul flights using this technology. The main challenge is with creating and certifying the technology is safe. We do have people in the aircraft, but by the time this technology is safe and usable, probably at least 10 to 20 years. If we project to our carbon targets for 2050, 20 years is a very large part of the time we have left.

The main drawbacks are the time to develop certified the energy density, the number of batteries that you would need to fly in A380. The large aircraft between Singapore and Paris, for instance, is about the weight of the aircraft itself. At the moment with current battery technology, it’s not viable.

That's for hydrogen and electric. We have a lot of challenges, which is why most of you must have heard about what we called SAFs or sustainable aviation fuel. This is one of the key approaches to abate carbon in the aviation industry. We have different types of sustainable aviation or SAFs. The first one is really called the sustainable aviation fuel, but we also have synthetic aviation fuel or even ESAF. The main one you've probably heard about is biofuel produced from biomass and from waste. The second one is called synthetic aviation fuel, basically chemically produced from green hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and ESAF is pretty much the same, they just differ in the production means. The downside with his fuel is that it competes with food security, and it has a high need for land and water. So in order to produce a lot of aviation fuel, you need to compete with to maintain priority over air transportation. It's also at the moment very expensive. The industry is looking at ways to reduce the cost of sustainable aviation fuel. The cost itself is a huge challenge and there's also obviously for synthetic aviation fuel and ESAF, there's a competition with the energy sector. We also need energy for other means and using it to produce fuel can be a challenge.

SAF is still one of the keyways to abate carbon in this industry. We see that there are some challenges, and the industry is working to mitigate these challenges. SAF is probably one of the best ways to reduce carbon. So that's what we foresee in terms of development in the coming 10 to 20 years. I'll move on to the fleet modernisation which can allow up to 20 and 30% reduction. The range is generally 20 to 30 so it's quite significant how do we achieve this reduction so obviously modernised fleet. You need to change the aircraft to the most recent aircraft for better aerodynamics, lighter materials, advanced engine technology and advanced avionics. All of these allows you to gain 30% emissions which is quite significant, combined with a sustainable aviation fuel. You can get some interesting level of reductions. The downsides are you need to renew your fleet time on the operational lifetime. Between 10 and 20 years, that's a time that you need to renew your fleet. Some aircraft that have been renewed 5 years ago, for instance, while you probably need to wait another 15 years before you. Actually, it's economically viable to replace them. There is this challenge, it's an asset intensive way to reduce carbon that's for synthetic aviation fuel and fleet modernisation. Lastly, technology and digitisation will have a big impact on operational improvements. And this is mainly we're working together with the aviation authorities in the region and Thales group. What are these operational improvements, basically looking at your end-to-end flights from the departure gate all the way to the arrival gate. We called this trajectory-based operations. We're trying to make the whole journey between these two gates as efficient as possible. Areas we're looking at is for instance, detecting time leaving the gates and starting the engines as late as possible, and making sure that when the aircraft pushes back it's ready to go and doesn't need to tap hold before it can depart or take off. That's basically time where the aircraft is burning fuel. We want to minimise that. In terms of flight trajectories, we look to optimise the climbing phase, the cruising phase and the descent phase so it's quite complex. There is a lot of potential to be gained there, these are areas that we're actively working. I'll touch on a little bit on how digital technology allows us to help in this area.

The last area where we can improve it operationally is in terms of arrivals, so coordinating arrivals into an airport is quite challenging, and you might have experienced the holding patterns or delays as you were flying into Singapore because density is quite high and there can be some delays. Whenever an aircraft is delayed, we're burning a lot of fuel in the air because we always need to fight against the gravity which is one of the givens in aviation. Once we have the wheels up, we're always fighting against gravity that's physics and we cannot do anything about it. We want to improve the efficiency of arrivals. In order to tap into these operational improvements, there are challenges and advantages over other ways to improve. The challenge is that we need a high level of collaboration and cooperation between the countries in order to optimise flights from gate to gate. Obviously, we're never flying to Singapore from Singapore to Singapore. Whenever we're flying outside of Singapore, we need to cooperate with countries around such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, China etc.

Currently, there are limited ways of collaborating in air traffic management and aviation in the region. This is a big difference to Europe and the United States of America, where you have the FAA and bureau control looking after this coordination. This is where we want to develop collaboration in the region in order to really tap into these operational games. That's first challenge but it can be addressed and improved. Asia Pacific is also quite fragmented, we have a very technology-savvy country such as Singapore, very keen to invest and develop into technologies and other countries who are less advanced and more limited in terms of technological capabilities and procurement capabilities. Everyone needs to work together, and this is one of the challenges that we need to address at the moment. There's relatively limited accountability in terms efficiency of the domain. And I'm speaking of regional level, not necessarily country by country. At regional level, there's no regulatory framework or overarching infrastructure or authority that looks into this, which makes life a little bit more difficult in order to tap into these optimisations. Lastly, in terms of advantages for operational improvements. The key aspect is that improving operations is something that can be factored across the whole domain, and it doesn't need an asset-intensive solution. Improving process is basically the way aircraft fly and the infrastructure that you need to support that is can be quite asset light, especially in the world of digital technology where we can leverage cloud technology. In order to do this optimisation, share information and collaborate better. Once the technology is deployed, the marginal cost is quite low. The challenge is to really find disrupt this way of non-collaboration into a collaborative means of improvements in terms of operational efficiency. That's our challenge for the aviation sector.

Ben Choi: That is really a lot of insights, and you just provided us with the perfect hook for the next bit of today's webinar, which is about sustainability and the digital era. As you have mentioned, indeed technologies and in particular probably digital technologies can be quite helpful and instrumental in terms of overcoming various challenges which you have mentioned. I guess our audience probably have already heard or use AI machine learning automation not just within the banking sector, aviation or chemicals, basically normal lives. We are probably already getting impacted by all this technology.

In the next bit, we are going to spend some time with our panellists looking into how we can use digital technologies or any other form of technologies to basically help us to overcome and better able to realise potential, transforming to a more sustainable economy as well as market. Abhi, can you share with us within your domain, what are some of the interesting and exciting things that you can tell us about with regards to digitisation and sustainability.

Abhiruchi Gadgil: Definitely, Ben as you rightly pointed out just now, the digitisation is not limited to a sector. It's really a trans person pillar that goes across the sector and implementation of sustainable practices literally across all sectors. I'll try to focus on the more generic manufacturing operational entity that I represent so that we can have insight from the sector itself.

The most important peck of the puzzle and sustainable practices is in terms of what we stand for in terms of renewable energy is the renewable energy implementation itself. The most important part of that will be management of the grid itself. A lot of digital solutions for maintenance and deployment. Energy management in terms of the point of view of different use cases that we are dealing with, so energy management system for a cooling network will be very different from utilities contract with a company versus probably a data centre which requires a different optimisation of energy. A lot of digital tools to cater to the use cases which are super important in the digital domain to be developed as the grid gets more and more complex. I'll take a bit of a step back in how manufacturing projects are designed and how digital solutions can come in at every point in time in the lifetime of it. The products could be Greenfield or Brownfield, so the digital solutions that you're using for or a Greenfield or a Brownfield project will be slightly different for Greenfield. The project from the very fundamentals where the digital tools can come into intel, where can be in terms of raw material, choice, sustainable supply chain design, very important part of that as well. The design of the actual process and the products as well can come in through a lot of new digital tools and techniques that are coming in. Now, we are used for sustainability, the fundamental, I think, tenets we all use, which are overused, probably. But which is very important is reduced to use recycle. Once we are, the project is up and running, and there are considerations of the end of life as well.

We need to make sure that the waste management in whatever format it is. If it is the actual waste, in terms of physical waste that has to be reused. And digital solutions are very important for that at the same time. If we are using it for example, something like a coal recovery from a plant where there is excessive coal, that can be also called as a waste. The digital solutions are important to take into account this and manage this sort of extra energy or extra material that we are getting out of a main manufacturing plant or utilities. In addition to it, what sort of digital solutions are we implementing not only here but across the globe to have a very broad perspective of what we are using currently already. We have several tools. I think the positioning is from the point of view of using digital tools for solutions for accelerating the sustainability even more. And one of the tools is for optimising the management of heating and cooling networks for improving performance of complex assets. The benefit that we get out of it, what Eugenia also said before in terms of energy efficiencies, almost 3 to 5 on a daily basis is a huge improvement. We also have a lot of predictive maintenance solutions for thermal assets for refrigeration as well, using machine learning and different techniques. We also have improved the equipment performance drastically which are interconnected with all the other equipment, probably formation of digital twin so that we can have predictive control and have more smarter control on the assets that we have and foresee what are the issues that might come up. We also have a lot of solutions for comprehensive solutions for residential users. There are a lot of energy sources and a lot of things that we use as energy at home and our responsibility is to also make sure that we are empowered to reduce our own personal footprint so there are a lot of things that are provided as a residential user as well. From the research perspective which I belong to the entity is more forward looking than the predictive controls and the operations that we are already doing is from the point of view of right now two main focus areas we have: 1) as a firm is one energy management system for different use cases that we're tracking right from hydrogen to data centres to on-site utilities for different applications; 2) the use of generative AI we are using, we have identified around 200 use cases are right now piloting around 12 of them. Some of them are around health and safety, some of them are about automating some of the practices in terms of maintenance manuals. These are the sort of array of digital solutions that really augment and make of a case for accelerated adoption of sustainability, and it literally can be implemented from the initial part when the project is only on paper to the end of life or circularity concepts.

Ben Choi: Thank you very much. That is indeed fantastic with regards to the research side of it. All our audience benefited a lot to hear about how you folks are looking into using technologies to optimise or basically to enabled energy management at a large scale at the grid level as well as lower individualised level. And you also mentioned the buzzword basically generative AI as well with regards to facilitating the automation of some of those practices.

Up next, Eugenia to share your experience and knowledge around the bank sectors, what is the role of technology maybe particular digitisation in terms of sustainability practices that you have experience in.

Eugenia Koh: I guess the investments and the product side of things, even though as a bank, we do adopt a number of technologies to increase efficiencies as Abhi was talking about. I think more importantly what's been really interesting is that we see a lot of big AI machine learning really helping to solve some of the challenges when it comes to ESG data. If you've studied sustainable finance or sustainable investing, you will know that data quality and data availability is a challenge when it comes to looking at either investment products or sometimes also financing because that data is not standardised and often difficult to really quantify or track.

What we've seen is that technology has come in to really help that space grow. I wouldn't say that we are at a point whereby we see standardised data yet or where we're in the Holy Grail of high levels of data quality. I think that the role that technology and digitised solutions have really played is that they have enabled that to grow even further, so that there is slightly better confidence around just the data that is being looked at. You have stuff like satellite technology that can also inform asset managers of some of what they're being told. For instance, by the investee companies, they can actually see the exact spots of the factories of the plantations and where they can dive deeper into either the emissions level or even sometimes the biodiversity kind of challenges where those spots are. I think all of those is interesting because it's just enabling better data quality. That's one. The other error is that you see that also from a products perspective, you have digital solutions that are leading to product innovation so as a tangible example in some parts of the West, they have smart meters installed in households, and essentially you can have either a loan or mortgage linked to energy efficiency. So essentially, as you installed at smart meter, you provide that data to your banks on how you are reducing the energy consumption over time. You just get better pricing for loans and so I think very practical ways of how digital solutions are also really helping consumers get onto the bandwagon of sustainability. Sometimes it can be quite a big concept and people don't know where to start. Being able to merge that with tangible financial incentives/products help towards the overall decarbonisation.

Ben Choi: This is something very refreshing to me indeed because I do look into smart meters

and all those technologies to try to encourage consumer behaviour such as energy usage. I think you hit the sweet spot what with what you say just now. If the bank is aware, all the energy providers basically is aware about the reduction effort that has been put into usage. Electricity, for example, then the consumer probably will get better pricing, and this is quite the contrast with the standard practice that we have now whereby you are basically punished to some extent, the more that you use the more that you pay. So I guess that is very effective and you have mentioned certainly, a lot of organisations, we have a very key role to play alright. Finally Franc, tell us more about extending to whatever you have just ended with earlier the role of digitisation in your areas.

Francois Balland: I think there's many parallels between what Abhi and Eugenia said and in terms of what I was sharing on the operational improvements. We basically rely on two big disruptors or digital concepts, which are concept of digital twin and on high quality data. The main pain points that that we have also in in terms of management of air traffic is similar to the fleet of aircraft. We also have long service life and traditional systems in the systems that do manage air traffic. So, for instance, Singapore is running air traffic management, it's a teles solution and it was provided in the 2010s, basically a traditional system so you have huge servers running on premise, a monolithic system with a long life. So how do you transform disrupt operations when you're running on this type of a solution is one of the pain points that we want to address and for which digital technology is helping us. The second point is with the region and how to bring these solutions towards the region the fact that it was fragmented in terms of technology and procurement so digital technology also allows an asset light solution and basically any country in the world to log into the Internet and internet connections to log into a central or distributed solution in order to work collaboratively, This is basically the approach that we took starting in 2019 when the air lab started.

We started by developing digital services and a digital twin called the ATM (air traffic management) twin. This allowed us to use these technologies to leverage data. This twin is fed by real-time data, which allows us to prototype new solutions and concepts off the loop. Basically, we have the real system running and we have the twin in the cloud in which we can perform prototyping, investigation, research innovation, develop these new collaborative concepts and allow to be doing this in a collaborative way. Thanks to the approach of digital twin developed in the past years, allowing prototyping and development at high speed on service-based and cloud infrastructure. You might know flight radar 24. This gives us a global view of air traffic. We have this source as well as more specialised sources. The quantity of data that we can tap in nowadays is huge and the challenge is not any more really getting the data. Once you have these terabytes of data in real-time flowing in, what can you do with it? And this is really where our service technology-based on ATM Twin. And we're looking into AI to really extract trends out of this environment in order to formulate some improvements. We basically have an approach which is first to analyse the data that we modelise new concepts and then we trial these. We often have a 3-step phase, where we measure, we change, and we measure again in the improvements. We can basically have this loop of continuous improvement, which is allowed by digital technology, so our solutions are developed around this in order to increment, we bring new changes.

In terms of technology, everything runs in the cloud so it's very easy to change, deploy and make it available to all stakeholders. We're working with the ecosystem including NTU, they have the ATM research Institute. We're working in Singapore with many start-ups and Research Institute, and this is also the benefit of the digital technologies we're able to bring together all these people very easily in matter of seconds, experiment on common things. Our hopes going forward with this digital technology is to really leverage it on a regional scale to use a virtualised system cloud-based that will help us do cross-border collaboration. It's a service based operating model. Obviously, there's a lot of cyber security questions but this is something that we manage. We all heard about the recent disruptions last week, so cyber security and keeping the systems running is always key. That’s one of the aspects we look into to tap into all these operational improvements. We're in the process of developing more of a regional platform, so we hope to embark more of the region in the coming months and years on this platform, in order to really leverage the power of digitisation in order to create these optimisations. Time is running fast, and we need to act now in order to address our goals in terms of carbon mitigation by 2050. We're basically on board and working every day using this type of technology.

Ben Choi: Indeed, time flies when we have important societally important targets to help achieve. We are now reaching the final bit of this webinar which is our Q&A. Franc, you ended up with the impact or the power of digitisation, the technologies that can be useful at impacting the region at large. With regards to some of the sustainable practices or technologies that are well-practised or established in Singapore, how do you see some of those that can be transfer or localised and implemented in the surrounding countries in the region?

Francois Balland: I think what’s remarkable is that in Singapore is the country’s investment on technology and the way it addressing the problem. First, realising the problem of carbon emissions and all the sustainability topics and building a long-term roadmap in terms of ways to address it. This relies on innovation, accountability and willpower to improve this. There's the technology itself and what they've achieved throughout, this investment and development of these technologies that the region can really take a benefit from by following Singapore as a role model. In terms of attitude, stopping and thinking how we can really tap into these improvements in a way that involves not only the country, but the region I think that's quite remarkable in Singapore through its investment in order to bring change. If there's something that the region should take out of this, I would recommend this to focus on the innovation and investment to bring forward technology and its benefits.

Ben Choi: We have time for one more question. I think our audience are interested to understand about the myth that sustainable technology, is it sustainable? Creating new gases, the creation of it requires energy as well, and sometimes it might involve even more energy in this extraction or creation compared to the existing and traditional practices.

Abhiruchi Gadgil: It’s a very valid question to ask. I think how it works is we need all the solutions for decarbonisation. Whatever is available, we need all of them. It's not one solution fits all. I think a lot of criticism has been around probably hydrogen for example, it's a very good use case to explain this. The process itself is very intensive. From the technology perspective, there is a lot happening to decarbonise it as much as possible. It has a geographic significance whenever you implement something energy intensive which is an alternative method because hydrogen eventually feed into the green gases, and green feed stocks. But making hydrogen itself is very energy intensive, it's a problematic proposition. You have to think about it from the perspective of where it is made, where it should be at a place where the renewable sources are plenty so that the hydrogen made is completely green in that context. Where do you use it? You don't want to use it for everything. There are quite a lot of uses of hydrogen which are researched, and which are very well known. For example, direct, reduced iron for the steel industry which is where there is no other alternative to be used. There are a very specific uses where it can be and where it is essential to decarbonise. There are several technologies, a discussion about solar panels. Why there are rare materials which are finite in the world, and definitely need to be conserved in the long term. How do we address it? We have several technologies coming up for solar panels, the efficiencies have improved greatly in the last 10 years. Are they going to be a one-on-one replacement? No, but how can it be addressed is to expand, there are peroxides and organic Pvs which can used on facades of buildings for example. You increase the surface area the moment you have a flexible Pv, you increase the surface area that could be used for Pv, so the overall requirement can be managed. The technology has to be looked at in a way where we are using it at the right places where the resources are correct, where it is truly renewable, and the application is correct. I am a believer in technology and if we have the right combination of it and choose wisely, it should be a good solution.

Ben Choi: Thank you very much for enlightening us. I shall try to summarise and conclude - the future is bright. There are challenges and the opportunities. What's most important is that we need to arm and have access to the right knowledge such that we can become innovative. We can solve the problems and be very creative along the way.

Watch the webinar here: