Bentley Systems — the infrastructure engineering software company — has announced the availability of new carbon assessment capabilities in iTwin experience to enable infrastructure professionals to quantify carbon reduction opportunities in their projects at the environment analyst global business summit on 27-28 Jun 2023 in Chicago, US.
With the new capabilities, infrastructure professionals can automate embodied carbon calculation reports and impact analyses, enabling them to explore multiple design choices faster and eliminate manual data exports and normalisation.
In 2022, Bentley developed an integration service in the iTwin platform to automate the process of generating embodied carbon reports for infrastructure projects via One Click LCA and EC3. Reports are initiated using the platform and then viewed in One Click LCA or EC3. It provides a ready-to-go, bi-directional integration with EC3, enabling carbon assessments to be visualised in a digital twin without the need to write code. iTwin experience exports a data model to EC3, a free tool for which users need to be separately registered, which performs the embodied carbon calculations and returns results that iTwin experience reads.
Organisations that want to include carbon assessment workflows in their infrastructure projects without developing iTwin-powered apps will benefit from its available carbon calculation capabilities. It also integrates carbon assessment workflows with other Bentley products for designing and managing infrastructure projects. The capabilities are released in Preview and will be available for a restricted number of partners and early adopters.
Kaustubh Page, director of product management with Bentley Systems, said, “Because the required data needed to be manually exported from multiple design authoring tools and then aggregated and verified, generating these environmental assessments has been a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process. With these new capabilities, it is feasible to transform what is typically a 6 month process into a 6 min workflow. Our goal is for users to spend time on designing, optimising, and making better decisions faster — not exporting, aggregating, and validating data.”
Its director of empowering sustainable development goals (ES(D)G) Rodrigo Fernandes said, “We want to enable users to implement carbon analysis and optimisation as a natural, repeatable, and standardised procedure. The sooner that carbon assessment is integrated into an infrastructure project, the bigger the carbon reduction opportunities will be. iTwin experience unleashes opportunities for telling the whole ‘carbon story’ of an infrastructure project and asset. We are unlocking environmental footprint assessments powered by infrastructure digital twins.”
US architecture and enginnering company Burns & McDonnell is working with Bentley to test their new iTwin-powered carbon reporting capabilities for the electric utility industry. Mark Tablante, Burns & MacDonnell design technology director, added, “Electrification is a critical component to meeting the world’s decarbonisation goals. Capital investment [is] needed in electric transmission and distribution infrastructure. A carbon-efficient design makes the most of every dollar spent to decarbonisation. Tracking and reporting on progress toward utilities’ net zero goals is important to shareholders and the future.”
Images: Bentley Systems
