The Port as an Energy HUB: What Does It Take?
Ports today face increasing demands for shore power, emissions trading, and electrification, driven by regulations like EU ETS, Green Deal/Fit for 55, and IMO. Simultaneously, they confront challenges such as grid limitations, financial risks associated with operating energy infrastructure, and a lack of real-time monitoring and control. Fjuel offers an IoT platform to transform ports into agile energy hubs with profitable and automated energy operations.
So, what does it truly take to transform your port into a sustainable energy hub? It involves a strategic, five-step approach, each underpinned by the power of digitalization and intelligent energy management.
Step 1: Digitalization – Unifying Your Energy Infrastructure
The first step is to digitalize and IoT-enable all infrastructure – from shore power facilities and charging solutions to batteries, energy production, cranes, and hydrogen/ammonia stations. The goal is to reduce proprietary solutions and manual work, as well as to achieve real-time overviews and statistics.
Fjuel digitalizes and optimizes ports’ shore power and charging infrastructure by integrating equipment from various vendors into a unified top-level system. This provides real-time and historical data access.
Step 2: Gain Insight and Control – Mastering Your Energy Landscape
After digitalization, the focus shifts to gaining in-depth insight and control over energy infrastructure. This involves monitoring consumption and peaks per unit, facility, customer, and even vessel types. It also includes automatic invoicing, real-time data synchronization, and enhanced operational oversight.
Fjuel provides exceptional control through its platform. You gain real-time and historical data access, as well as tools for profit and loss analysis to manage energy revenues and costs. The platform also offers dynamic pricing and payment solutions with automated billing and a stakeholder reporting tool.
Step 3: Optimization & Load Balancing – Maximizing Efficiency and Capacity
Many ports are constrained by limited grid capacity. This step focuses on overcoming those limitations by optimizing the use of existing infrastructure through intelligent load balancing. It involves ensuring that all shore power and charging units are operationally ready, supported by two-way communication that enables real-time control and dynamic adjustments.
Virtual peak management plays a critical role by coordinating and aggregating multiple grid connections, while battery systems -where available – can be used for peak shaving to stabilize demand. These measures can lead to substantial efficiency gains, including up to 60% reduction in peak loads during electric crane operations.
Fjuel enables sophisticated energy orchestration and load balancing to optimize capacity utilization and dynamically adjust energy consumption in real time where needed. We also offer energy forecasting to predict energy demands.
Step 4: Ensure Profitable Operations: Turn Energy into Revenue
Ports face significant financial risks when operating energy infrastructure. This step focuses on ensuring profitable operations. This involves cost reduction through digital solutions, such as lower grid costs via load management, enhanced uptime with predictive maintenance, and maximizing existing infrastructure to defer CAPEX. Simultaneously, it’s about revenue enhancement through digital tools and optimized pricing.
Fjuel aims to make ports smart energy hubs with profitable operations. Our platform includes a power pricing optimization tool to ensure cost coverage and healthy margins. We also offer advisory and preliminary project support from the tender phase to ensure cost-effective and future-proof hardware.
Step 5: Social Responsibility: Contribute to the Local Community
The final step is about social responsibility. This includes data-driven insights and transparency – visualizing the impact of electrification, benchmarking against other ports, and accurate CO₂ emissions accounting.
Ports can also strengthen local emergency resilience. By integrating with municipal plans and using ship-based generators or batteries, they can act as energy hubs to support critical infrastructure like hospitals during crises.
Fjuel helps your port take the lead in sustainability. Our platform provides data-driven insights and transparency to visualize the impact of electrification and enable open reporting and demonstrating true community value.
Transform Your Port Today with Fjuel
The journey towards becoming an energy hub is long, but with Fjuel, you receive comprehensive support from early project planning to strategic implementation. We empower ports by connecting energy infrastructure with the grid and end-users in a single platform.
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