Solutions to Enable Climate Change Action Among Clients

Climate change is increasingly becoming an immediate and substantial threat to humanity’s development and prosperity. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we must transform at speed and scale.The way our economies, businesses and communities work. Sustainability has become important for enterprises across industries. Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) reports that 62% of CXOs consider a sustainability strategy necessary to be competitive today, and another 22% thinks it will be in the future – a $1 trillion+ market segment. As the expectations on corporate responsibility increase, and there is scrutiny on business operations, enterprises are recognizing the need to act on sustainability in a way that produces tangible outcomes. The good news is that when an enterprise takes sustainability as their purpose, they can increase growth and profitability, while also caring for the people and improving the planet on which they depend.

Experience that is enabling our clients

Over the past decade, Infosys has been leveraging technology to build and run some of the most efficient buildings and campuses globally. Campuses that conserve energy, save water and treat waste responsibly. Infosys campuses are ‘living labs’ for clean technology. Leveraging our expertise we set up the Sustainability Consulting practice in 2020. The practice works collaboratively with business units to scale technology-led solutions to tackle climate change. Read HFS Research here – Infosys’ chance to seize the sustainability-first narrative

Our sustainability philosophy is about ensuring that our business, our clients’ business and our ecosystems are all sustainable. Our strategy is crafted in consultation with our internal and external stakeholders and contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We approach sustainability at the enterprise level within the broader investing framework of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) dimensions and is accomplished through a mix of carbon reduction and science-based offsetting. Now, we are bringing our net carbon neutral success to sustainable offerings for our clients, throughout the market. We have proven that it understands the metrics of sustainability and global reporting criteria.

Client-focused services

We help our customers renew their existing products and processes to improve the efficiencies and sustainability and leverage next-generation sustainable products technology.

Benefits of embracing the portfolio of our sustainability solutions:

Achieving a positive impact on the triple bottom-line of people, profit and purpose
Attracting a new wave of sustainability-minded customers, supply chain partners and employees
Enhancing their customers’ ESG attractiveness to investors and brand reputation
Securing business resilience during uncertain outlooks
Helping create new circular business models that allow smooth transformation

Sustainability - A native competency for employees

We have set a 12-month goal to have every engineering proposal, and a 24-month goal for every Infosys proposal to include at least one sustainability service offering. The objective may start with our teams delivering in a sustainable manner by tracking carbon footprint, making better use of cloud services, economizing programmatic code, improving operational efficiencies, digitizing offline processes, and driving methods to increase diversity in the workplace as part of the SLA.

We launched a new advisory and technical solution called Infosys EcoWatch, which enables our teams to readily deliver solutions, such as decarbonization, PLM circularity, and ESG Financial as a service today. Infosys EcoWatch is a solution built on Microsoft stack (Microsoft Business Applications) which currently facilitates institutions to monitor, track and collect data (both manual and automated) in the Environment (Energy, Water, Waste and GHG), Social and Governance space for institution-owned facilities and spaces. It provides end-to-end processes and reporting capabilities, adhering to industry standards, to execute activities across the Plan to Publish sustainability lifecycle. It also creates climate risk models providing information on various risks with respect to geography, region, and companies, which help identify lower-risk lending opportunities.

A promising start

In the first year of this journey, we completed 20+ projects facilitating clients in their transition to combat climate change through business-driven IT solutions around CCUS, energy storage, next-generation innovative and sustainable products and services, renewables, energy efficiency, brown field modernization and transformation, clean energy generation and trading, as well as electric mobility. The coming year is an exciting one for us. We have many opportunities in the pipeline with a focus on energy, chemical, smart utilities, mining, transition to cloud services, predictive PLM, smart spaces, and circularity solutions for sustainable manufacturing, financial services, and consumer product retail.

Entering an MoU with bp

We signed an MoU with bp to develop an integrated Energy as a Service platform to leverage the bp’s and Infosys various areas of expertise. While our digital capabilities will be used to manage energy assets, provide low carbon power, low carbon heating/cooling, and low carbon mobility to campuses, driven by an AI-based digital platform, bp’s expertise and resources in renewable solar and wind together with gas for power, fuels, electric vehicle charging, battery swapping and advanced mobility solutions will be crucial. The integrated Energy as a Service offering will be piloted at Infosys’ Pune campus, and later scaled to other Infosys campuses, smart cities, and industrial and business parks. This will help reduce emissions at campuses and cities.

Approach to partnering with clients

Our client-focused sustainability initiatives prioritise the following two objectives:

By developing products and solutions that are cleaner
Improving processes through effective use of advanced technologies like IOT, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Some ways in which the above is achieved are:

Energy monitoring and reduction applications
Applications in air quality management
Predict water demand using AI historical data and weather data to help optimize the use of natural resources
Robots for automated sludge management and
solar panel cleaning
Legacy infrastructure transformation through
use of technology enabled solutions

The year saw us implement multiple solutions for our clients in manufacturing, pharma, utilities and services.

Next Gen Grid and energy solutions

We collaborate with global energy clients to navigate the new energy landscape and build and deliver end-to-end energy transition offerings. These solutions are within the following domains:

Next-gen grid
Renewables or electrification
Carbon intensity reduction and net-zero sustainability vision

Our next-gen grid framework facilitates the convergence of energy and mobility and imbues the flexibility to deploy use cases related to grid modelling, planning management, and optimization at a rapid pace, using open-source technologies. The framework is aligned to NIST Smart Grid Framework 4.0, IEEE Architecture and is in association with industry-leading partners in the Utility Grid ecosystem. We operate in this domain by means of integrating a set of information technology, physical infrastructure, and standardized business processes in an open manner to provide unique services.

Sustainable Energy Digital Platform (SEDP)

IntelliSmart has signed an MoU with us to develop a ‘Sustainable Energy Digital Platform (SEDP)’ for providing value-added services of Discoms, to accelerate digitalization and integrate data analytics across the power sector, enabling greater efficiency. The MoU was signed at the 'Realizing the Vision of Digital Smart Grid in India' roundtable hosted by IntelliSmart on January 15, 2021, attended by senior officials from the Ministry of Power, Department of Economic Affairs, and expert delegates from across India's energy ecosystem.

Industry recognitions for energy transition

The IDC MarketScape has positioned Infosys in the Leaders category in its North American Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS) Strategic Consultants and Systems Integrators 2020 Vendor Assessment (doc # US44514919, March 2020)
One of the largest publicly traded water, wastewater and natural gas providers in the US, Essential Utilities, has selected us as their strategic partner to drive its digital transformation.
We have been chosen by El Paso Water as its strategic partner for customer service transformation
We have been identified as a 'Leader' in 'Smart IT Services in Utilities' by NelsonHall in its NEAT evaluation 2019
We were name a Leader in Next-Gen Private/Hybrid Cloud – Data Center Services & Solutions by ISG^TM

Case study 01

Transforming brownfield assets

This year, we successfully executed Operational Technology (OT) Asset Discovery Solution for a leading Mining company that was faced with a challenge to maintain oversight and visibility on the operational technology and equipment across 30 mines. With the available limited and unreliable documentation, restricted access, non-standard data and templates across locations, the team successfully identified 84,000+ pieces of equipment and created a reliable inventory database for the client’s global mine sites.

The solution helped in realizing the following benefits:

Increase in asset visibility by 20-25%
Greater operational efficiency of ~30%
Improvement in safety measures by ~20%
Being future-ready by replacing old assets with advanced systems

Enabling clients in building a sustainable ecosystem

We are at the forefront of applying our engineering and advanced technology expertise to helping our customers realize next-generation sustainable products and processes.

Our most prominent client projects during FY21 leverage our experience in ensuring enterprise eco-efficiency, as detailed below.

Living labs for progress

Infosys Living Labs are the beating heart of our innovation ecosystem. They are key to furthering our clients’ innovation-at-scale needs across multiple dimensions. Here we proactively monitor Horizon 3 technologies, business trends and other thought leadership initiatives, such as Listening Post as a Service (LPAAS) which enables the rapid prototyping, incubation and pilot of ground-breaking solutions by using emerging technologies. The labs encourage a culture of innovation, provide requisite infrastructure and ensure a seamless transition from a PoC to large scale implementation. This is done by leveraging our Global Innovation Hubs and tapping into our Partner Ecosystem that includes start-ups, universities and hyperscalers.

Infosys Innovation Network (IIN) is our well-orchestrated partnership with select start-ups to provide innovative services to our clients. The IIN program aims to create lighthouse wins for clients to experiment and implement art-of-the-possible. We are de-risking client adoption of technology products and solutions through careful curation, finding the right fit and implementing early pilots. During FY21, we engaged with numerous start-ups across geographies like US, Finland, Israel and India, who work on technologies like AI, Fintech, Cloud, Cybersecurity, among others. This program has led to us working with a European Postal Service Company and an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate to integrate emerging technology start-up solutions into their business ecosystem. Through IIN, we are also partnering with key clients to collaborate with their Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) by bringing together our portfolio of Innovative Tech Start-ups, identifying various client innovation opportunities and establishing joint go-to-market strategies for new business opportunities across the globe.

Case study 02

Robots for cleaning up

Concern

Today US has an installed conductor base of 400K miles and the power loss amounts to 25BUSD. Utilities are facing a problem of aging infrastructure and huge transmission power losses. It must be noted that 25% of the installed conductor base will require replacement in another 10 years. In addition, the transmission power lines tend to heat up due to power transmission and exposure to solar heating. This causes the conductors to sag and may cause forest fires due to vegetation intrusions.

Approach

Our Infosys’ Advanced Engineering Group partnered with one of our clients to develop innovative autonomous robots that clean and coat the overhead conductors live with client proprietary coating material.

See here: https://www.infosys.com/navigate-your-next/documents/autonomous-robots.pdf

Outcome

This helps enhance the current carrying capacity by 25%, while also reducing power losses and conductor sag by 25%. The developed robots are currently undergoing field tests before getting into commercialization phase.

Case study 03

Cooling that does not contribute to global warming

The current residential air-conditioning (AC) systems are based on vapor compression cycle that uses refrigerants with high global warming potential and/or high ozone depletion potential. Our objective was to help design the next generation air-conditioning system which is eco-friendly and also comes with low installed cost. The air-condition system developed differs from traditional vapor compression cycle using Kraton’s innovative material NexarTM to transport humidity and utilize favorable properties of water for cooling. The innovation was selected as a finalist in the Global Cooling Prize and won US$ 200K as prize money

To read more on the project, click on this link for a press release by Kraton:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kraton-named-global-cooling-prize-finalist-300959252.html

Key projects in autonomous technology enablers

We developed autonomous platform derivative solutions like remote guided vehicle, autonomous buggy and guided vehicle to move equipment and material independently by helping organizations improve logistics efficiency, reduce operational and energy costs.

We are leveraging advanced technologies like vision and navigation as part of our pandemic response to tackle human health and safety. Some of these include automatic detection of elevated body temperature, social distancing norm compliance in food courts, remote guided vehicles for sanitization and food delivery.

We have built a robot to automatically clean the solar panels, which, in turn helps improve productivity and reduce losses in solar power generation. Some of these technologies were commercialized. Additionally, we have been using IOT and AI technologies to monitor and improve the performance of our solar power plant.

Experience

Insight

Innovate

Accelerate

Assure

Application Development and Maintenance

Business Process Management

Consulting Services

Incubating Emerging Offerings