How to ensure profitable shore power operations
Ports are rapidly sailing towards a greener future, embracing shore power and electric charging infrastructure as key components of their sustainability initiatives. This vital shift aligns with ambitious environmental goals, like those set by the EU ETS and Green Deal. However, navigating this transition isn’t always smooth, especially when it comes to managing the financial complexities of energy. Many ports find themselves grappling with the challenge of transforming environmental aspirations into economically sound operations, often facing significant hurdles that can impact profitability.
The Unpredictable Tides of Energy Costs
Imagine a port providing shore power at a fixed rate – a seemingly simple approach. Yet, this can expose ports to considerable financial risk. The cost of electricity, particularly when tied to market-aligned prices like Nord Pool, can fluctuate wildly.
For instance, records show spot prices reaching as high as 2.92 NOK/kWh in February 2025. If a port sells power at a fixed 3.50 NOK/kWh but purchases it at 5.00 NOK/kWh (plus a 1.50 NOK/kWh harbor fee), just 1000 kWh of consumption could lead to a substantial 1,500,000 NOK loss.
This inherent volatility, combined with the high upfront costs of green infrastructure, creates an environment where traditional, manual management systems often struggle to keep pace, leading to inefficiencies, errors, and a lack of real-time visibility into operations.
Charting a New Course: The Smart Energy Hub
To truly thrive in this evolving landscape, ports need to move beyond their traditional roles and evolve into smart energy HUBs. This vision means digitalizing and optimizing all energy infrastructure – from shore power stations and EV/vessel chargers to energy production and storage facilities.
The ultimate goal is to connect these diverse energy components with the grid and end-users within a single, unified top-level platform. This comprehensive approach is about transforming manual, error-prone operations into an automated, accurate, and seamless experience.
Empowering Profitability Through Digitalization and Dynamic Management
A core element of realizing this smart energy hub vision, and ensuring profitable infrastructure operations, lies in advanced payment solutions and intelligent energy management. This is precisely where a system designed for the modern port becomes invaluable.
Consider a platform that can:
- Automatically collect data directly from various facilities, such as shore power stations, EV and vessel chargers, and energy production/storage units.
- Combine this consumption data with active, dynamic pricing models. This streamlines billing, significantly reducing manual tasks, saving time, and minimizing human errors. This dynamic pricing, often aligned with market rates like Nord Pool, becomes a powerful tool to ensure energy sales always cover costs and maintain healthy margins, directly mitigating the financial risks of fluctuating purchase prices.
- Empower ports to gain comprehensive control over their energy income and costs. This includes the ability to conduct Profit & Loss analysis per asset, per site, or even for the entire port, alongside robust cost management tools.
Access to real-time data and insights into energy consumption, infrastructure performance, and operational trends forms the foundation for data-driven decision-making, allowing for optimization of energy usage and enhanced operational oversight. Such a system can also facilitate automated reporting obligations to authorities and customers, further enhancing transparency.
For ports to truly leverage this, they need a system that supports flexible payment management. Some ports might prefer a solution that manages all payment processes independently, while others might choose to manage payments themselves, leveraging the robust data and invoicing capabilities provided by the platform. This adaptability ensures seamless integration with the port’s existing management systems or ERPs, such as Visma, Grieg Connect, or PowerOffice.
Beyond Billing: The Wider Impact
By embracing such a digital approach to energy management, ports can unlock a multitude of benefits that extend beyond mere billing:
- Increased profitability and revenue enhancement by optimizing pricing strategies and maximizing capacity utilization and uptime of shore power infrastructure.
- Significant cost reductions through automation, error elimination, and optimized peak demand management. This includes virtual peak management and peak shaving.
- Improved efficiency and time savings as manual tasks are replaced by automated workflows.
- Enhanced transparency and control, providing complete clarity over energy usage and billing.
- Social responsibility, including supporting critical infrastructure and visualizing the impact of electrification.
Fjuel: Powering Smarter, Sustainable Ports
This transformative vision is at the core of Fjuel’s mission. As a Norwegian tech company proudly owned by several leading Norwegian harbors and energy companies, we specialize in digitalizing and optimizing shore power and charging infrastructure through our innovative IoT platform.
Fjuel’s platform serves as that unified top-level system, empowering ports to navigate the complexities of energy management and move towards profitable, sustainable operations. It’s about ensuring that the investment in green infrastructure yields not just environmental benefits, but also robust economic returns.
Embracing a Profitable and Sustainable Future
The transition to shore power and electrified operations is an undeniable future for ports. By adopting intelligent, integrated platforms that provide dynamic pricing, automated billing, and comprehensive financial control, ports can ensure that this green transition is also economically sound. It’s about being smart enough to turn the challenges of energy volatility into opportunities for sustained profitability.
To explore how such a platform can transform your port’s financial operations and contribute to a more profitable, sustainable future, consider learning more about our integrated energy management solutions.
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