Smart energy management for ports

Abstract

The maritime industry relies heavily on energy and container terminals, being an essential maritime hub, are huge energy consumers, contributing to high levels of air emissions. Terminal operators and port authorities are therefore facing pressure from stakeholders to reduce their energy consumption and air emissions.

With the emergence of cutting-edge technology, container terminals are looking to adopt smarter energy management approaches to not only achieve energy efficiency and reduce emissions but also contribute to the terminal’s sustainability efforts. Likewise for the Port of Singapore, being a word-class hub is expected to develop and exhibit strong sustainability practices. Hence, there is a rising demand for developing smarter energy management solutions and approaches in its operations.

This research project aims to analyse current port-side emission control measures, explore, and propose a conceptual framework on how smart technology can be further integrated into these measures to increase energy efficiency and manage energy consumption in container terminals with the Port of Singapore as the unit of analysis.

Existing information and operations port-side emission control measures were addressed, and the research gap was identified. An area not frequently addressed is the integration between the terminal operating system (TOS) and energy management. Therefore, the integration can be further analysed and an initial conceptual framework to integrate the TOS and energy management, supplemented by digital technology, was developed.

The objective of the integrated framework is to enable operators to schedule resources with both operational and energy efficiency in mind and gain visibility of energy consumption in the port. It includes components such as digital twin, real-time energy monitoring, and an energy dashboard.

Interviews and surveys were conducted to get industry feedback and comments from maritime and port professionals on the developed framework. The overall response was interpreted as favourable, and modifications were made to develop the final framework. A cost and benefit analysis was conducted and further supplemented by several used case studies across different ports around the globe.