Collaborative Energy Transformation Measures for Industrial Decarbonization: A System of Systems Engineering Challenge

Corporate decarbonization has become a major challenge for industrial systems. While many “low hanging fruit” measures have been implemented in industrial systems, each further measure tends to create an increasing amount of effort. Albeit decarbonization being an objective that has been pursued for several decades, many systems do not yet achieve milestones towards a low-carbon, carbon neutral or even climate positive production. While regulatory frameworks, reporting requirements as well as fluctuations and uncertainties in the energy market and physical energy supply motivate organizations to plan decarbonization measures for their industrial systems rather conservatively with short-term goals, long-term goals as well as measures that go beyond the scope of the own system boundary are often overlooked. In this work, we present, how System of Systems Engineering methods, tools and concepts can foster the identification, assessment and implementation of collaborative energy transformation measures, promoting an improved balance between effort and performance of these measures. We discuss the underlying systemic interrelations between a factory and its site characteristics, measure characteristics and how the effort of collaborative measures can be weighed against the performance. The intent is to provide novel perspectives that allow for additional decarbonization measures to be derived as well as to broaden the scope on the impacts of decarbonization measures to mitigate any trade-offs and problem shifting between constituent systems as well as assessment categories.