SITA-Envision: working together to decarbonize the airport industry

In conversation with Ynse De Boer, Vice President, Sustainability and Decarbonization, Envision Digital.

Tell us about Envision Digital?

Envision Digital is what we call a net-zero technology company. As a company, we deploy digital artificial intelligence and IoT technologies to help our customers accelerate and scale their journeys to net-zero.

Our software platform EnOS – Envision Operating System – will run more than 25% of all the wind and solar assets in the world. The software runs huge battery storage systems, entire electric vehicles charging infrastructures; it runs buildings, ports, entire industrial parks, campuses and even some cities. What is does essentially is to optimize operations, it optimizes maintenance and outputs.

What do you mean by AIoT technology?

AIoT is actually a merger of two terms: AI – Artificial Intelligence – and IoT – Internet of Things. It’s actually a very important and essential combination. As soon as you want to scale IoT, that’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in, to really automate both the onboarding but also to automate the ongoing maintenance of all those connected devices.

Can you explain the SITA-Envision partnership?

The aim is to decarbonize the airport industry. Airports are among the biggest energy consumers and through that, carbon emitters, in any economy. And they’re under huge pressure to decarbonize.

Envision Digital is the world’s leader in net-zero technologies to help businesses decarbonize, and SITA is the absolute world leader in IT, in SI, and in general professional services. We don’t see a combination other than SITA and Envision Digital better capable and better positioned to tackle that challenge for airports. The benefit there really is to help an airport own that multi-year journey towards net-zero. And it will involve many individual projects that collectively will comprise an overall program.

I’m extremely excited about the traction that we’re already getting, especially in Europe, with some of the major international airports in Central Europe.

What is a net zero airport?

What a net zero airport fundamentally has to do, it has to:

Reduce the consumption of energy. An airport will need to electrify anything that consumes energy, especially those things that today are still using fossil fuels

Then an airport needs to tap renewable energies at very large scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if airports would also start to follow in the footsteps of what we already see happening now in seaports, where we see seaports for example getting into investment decisions for huge scale renewable energy supplies. I’m talking hundred-gigawatts wind and solar parks, and that’s huge. And convert that to green hydrogen or green ammonia for example.

What would you say to stakeholders in the air transport industry?

Your customers are under huge pressure to decarbonize, from a whole range of stakeholders. So the one thing that I always say is, familiarize yourself with the subject matter. It’s essential to be able to spot the opportunities, and those opportunities there are everywhere, and they are huge, and they are staring us in the face right now!