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Reflections on 2020 and Predictions for 2021

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By Carl Ennis (pictured), CEO Siemens and Smart Infrastructure, GB&I

Since becoming CEO in December, most of my life has been dominated by Covid-19.  But despite causing many difficulties, the pandemic has brought some good. It has accelerated the pace of change and given us valuable insights into where – and how – we will work in the future, the skills we will need, and the environmental challenges we face.

It has also provided distraction from Brexit, which I hope will move the discussion away from its rights and wrongs to focus on how the country can maximise any opportunities in the year ahead.

In the new future many people will continue to work from home if they can do so effectively, while offices will become places to meet. At Siemens, like much of the UK business community, we have found that intercontinental flights and getting together in person is not as essential as we thought. We now run strategy workshops and town halls online, and even festivals where we engage with all our employees. I predict that these ways of communicating with each other and groups of people will continue.

One of the many benefits of this working model is accelerated decarbonisation, which we urgently need. Our economy was almost crippled during the first lockdown, yet CO2 emissions reduced by just 20% and NOX by 40%. Strategies to increase decarbonisation will be central to discussion at next year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Glasgow, in which I hope President-elect Biden’s administration will play a crucial role. Having the US agree that climate change is a real risk, with its scale and ability to influence global policies, will help the world address the issue.

My worry for the UK is that in the government’s enthusiasm to kick-start the economy, we will do what is easy or cheap rather than what is right. But instead of trying to generate short-term jobs we must “grow back green” and invest in long-term jobs that help decarbonise.

The government is also focused on identifying a couple of big things it can do to achieve the decarbonisation targets. These large-scale projects, such as investing in wind power and hydrogen, are important. Wind power is already generating more than 20% of the UK’s electricity, and hydrogen has huge potential for fuelling vehicles and trains and for replacing natural gas in home heating systems and industrial turbines.

But local initiatives are also essential if we are to meet our net zero carbon targets. That’s why Siemens has been helping local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) and local governments address energy challenges in transport, industry and infrastructure. Individuals need to get involved too. The old adage of environmentalists is “reduce, reuse, recycle.”  Reducing consumption requires all 66m people in the UK to participate.

I believe the shock that the virus has delivered to our economy will speed up digitalisation across industry. We will build a digital environment which will become central to everything we do. Unfortunately it will be painful for many sectors and businesses, but in the mid to long term it will be positive. History shows that when countries go through industrial revolutions there are winners and losers, but overall in the end everyone’s a winner.

We know that our businesses will be very different 10 years from now. A statistic that always astounds me is that 80% of the employees that we will have in 2030 are with us today. So while entry-level skills for apprentices and graduates matter, the existing workforce will need to re-skill too.

Adult learning is crucial and has gone unaddressed in the UK for too long. Covid-19 and Brexit have reinforced the need for us to develop and change our skills. This is not just about technical expertise — soft skills and vocational work will become increasingly necessary.

The fact that the virus pushed Brexit down the hierarchy of news was probably helpful. Anybody who’s been involved in negotiating a big deal knows you don’t want to do it on a public stage. The challenge is how to unlock the benefits people wanted without causing damage in the short term for individuals, society and business.

The negotiating teams have been trying hard to do that, and while time is short, most deal-making is done in the eleventh hour, so I remain hopeful. The gap between both sides is probably quite narrow, but a deal is essential for stability. Anything that goes above WTO arrangements will be positive.

President-elect Biden has been clear on his desire that the UK government does not implement changes that destroy the Good Friday agreement. We must not put that at risk. My father was from Dublin so I know first-hand how important the island of Ireland is to the Irish and our shared culture.

It’s going to be tough. From a business perspective, erecting barriers to trade is never a good idea. Brexit is likely to result in friction between us and our biggest trading partner, mainland Europe. That will present a challenge, but we’ll have to make the best of it. Luckily, as a nation we’re pretty good at triumphing over adversity and our business people are entrepreneurial.

Meanwhile, Brexit hasn’t stopped Siemens investing in the UK. In Hull, we partnered with Associated British Ports in a £310m investment to build a wind turbine blade manufacturing facility creating 1,000 jobs. And now we are spending £200m in Goole on a train facility to build the next generation of underground trains with 700 new jobs.

We still see the UK as a vibrant place and will continue to invest. While we would rather the added level of complexity of Brexit wasn’t there, it’s not stopping us from doing business.

But it will make life difficult for those of our suppliers and partners with vertically integrated supply chains in continental Europe and those who are trying to sell their products there. A brave person might make predictions about where they will be in a year’s time. But I will put my crystal ball aside for now.

Siemens partners with Social Enterprise UK procurement initiative

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Siemens is the latest high-profile business to sign up to the Buy Social Corporate Challenge – an initiative aimed at embedding positive social and environmental impact into everyday business spend.

The UK government-backed Challenge sees leading businesses open up their supply chains to social enterprises – businesses set up to address some of the biggest challenges we face, from the climate emergency to deepening social inequalities.

The group of businesses, now made up of 24 of some of the biggest names from the legal, professional services, construction and insurance worlds, has committed to collectively spend £1 billion with social enterprise suppliers.

There are 100,000 social enterprises in the UK, selling goods and services like any other business, but re-investing the majority of their profits to benefit society. They are found right across the economy – from catering to cleaning products, from signage to software development, and from waste disposal to workwear.

Siemens has already got to work with Social Enterprise UK, the membership body for UK social enterprises who are behind the campaign, to look at where spend can be shifted to these businesses.

Siemens is already working with a number of social enterprise suppliers, including Wiltshire Wood Recycling – part of the nationwide Community Wood Recycling network – which offers an award-winning wood collection and recycling service as well as volunteering and employment opportunities to individuals with barriers to the labour market.

Dietmar Harteveld, Head of Supply Chain Management at Siemens UK, said: “At Siemens we take our commitments to the sustainable development of the communities we work in seriously. Signing up to the Buy Social Corporate Challenge will help us increase our positive social and environmental impact as we use the power of procurement to improve lives, open up opportunities and build a greener, more equitable world. We look forward to working with Social Enterprise UK to bring more social enterprises into our supply chains.”

Peter Holbrook, Chief Executive of Social Enterprise UK, added: “Through buying from social enterprises, businesses are using money they would be spending anyway to change lives. With Covid-19 hitting communities and the economy hard, alongside a looming climate emergency, there has never been a more important time for campaigns like the Challenge which have the potential to shift the way we do business and build back better from the impact of the pandemic. It is fantastic to have a company with the size and influence of Siemens sign up and we look forward to introducing them to new social enterprise suppliers.”

€30m Triangulum project touts sustainable cities success

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The €30 million Triangulum project is drawing to a close, with participating cities beginning to share the first results from the five-year programme.

Triangulum is one of 14 European Smart Cities and Communities Lighthouse Projects (SCC1) funded by the European Union’s Research and Innovation Framework Programme Horizon 2020.

Since inception in February 2015, Triangulum has followed the journeys of three ‘Lighthouse’ cities: Manchester (UK), Eindhoven (NL) and Stavanger (NO) as each city implemented and tested innovative smart solutions in bids to create more sustainable urban environments.

Twenty-two partners from industry, research and government have steered and developed numerous mobility, energy, ICT and business improvement projects as three ‘follower’ cities from Lipzeig (D), Prague (CZ) and Sabadell (ES), and an additional Observer city, Tianjin (CHN) have shadowed developments; replicating the most successful concepts and solutions as Triangulum evolved.

In the UK, Manchester looked at the key issues of ICT, mobility and energy. Manchester City Council – the lead organisation of Triangulum in Manchester, The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University – partnered with Siemens as the technical partner to investigate how to balance energy consumption and demand, reduce costs and carbon emissions and increase the use of renewable energy along the city’s Oxford Road Corridor.

In 2019 Siemens upgraded the Building Energy Management System (BEMS) at Manchester Art Gallery to create a more stable indoor climate within the 200-year old listed building.

The gallery houses priceless artefacts and artworks where the control of temperature and humidity were vital to the care and conservation of thousands of valuable pieces and the Grade III listed building itself.  The replacement BEMS utilised a demand-side response operation that activated heating, cooling and humidity on a needs-basis while predictive analytics were used to return energy sources back onstream when required.

Siemens has also been working with Manchester Met University on its distributed energy system at the university’s Birley Campus. A 400kWh lithium-ion battery, installed at the University Birley Campus which integrates with new solar panels also installed on the roof as part of the project.

Together with the solar panels and the existing Combined Heat Power (CHP), it can supply power to 900 student rooms and a large academic building.  All these technologies are controlled by a Siemens microgrid controller, which will choose the best energy source to use and whether the battery should store or release energy.

A central controller – cloud-based energy management platform – effectively functioned as a virtual power plant and managed the renewable loads in tandem with the BMS located at three sites around the city: the Central Library and Town Hall Extension for Manchester City Council, Alan Turing, Alan Gilbert and Ellen Wilkinson buildings at The University of Manchester. 

The controller integrated with the BMS systems and switched non-critical assets like heating and cooling on and off in response to demands on the grid to maximise energy efficiency; compensating for different weather conditions or changing populations in any of the buildings.  The solution optimised energy consumption, reduced CO2 and lessened the area’s dependence on the grid.  Scaled citywide the central controller could potentially save Manchester approximately 57,000t CO2 emissions per annum – that’s the same as taking 12,000 cars off the road each year!

The findings from the Manchester pilot will be used to develop smart city quarters in other cities around the world. With 68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050 [UN] devising sustainable urbanisation solutions will be key to managing future growth and development.

On the conclusion of Triangulum and the completed energy-related work, Juergen Maier, CEO Siemens UK said:  “We are immensely proud to have participated in Manchester’s smart city vision and have learned and demonstrated, in equal measures, that with the right blend of investment, technologies, governance and citizen engagement, cities can evolve to be eco-efficient and fit-for-the-future. Triangulum has shown a blueprint for low-carbon, cost-efficient smart cities.  Manchester and Siemens have proven it is achievable, repeatable and scalable. Now to meet the carbon neutrality targets set by many cities around the world – these projects need to be rolled out at city and regionally-wide scale to have a significant impact on energy consumption and carbon emissions.”

Martine Tommis, Manchester Triangulum Coordinator at Manchester City Council, added: “Working with Siemens as part of the Triangulum project has been a really exciting contribution to supporting our journey to meet our ambitious target of becoming a zero-carbon city by 2038.  It is essential to innovate and create a much smarter, more efficient city, which is why we will continue to support the development of new energy systems and eliminate the need to use fossil fuels. The project is a tribute to what partnerships can achieve for our city.”

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay