Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the infrastructure engineering software company today announced at COP27 the expansion of integrated carbon workflows embedded in Bentley's iTwin platform.
The new integration makes it possible to assess carbon emissions in infrastructure digital twin solutions, thanks to the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3). Developed by the non-profit association Building Transparency, EC3 is a free and open access tool that allows for benchmarks, assessments and reductions of embedded carbon, focusing on the initial emissions of the building materials supply chain. Building Transparency provides training, resources and tools - including EC3 - to address the role of embedded carbon in climate change. The EC3 instrument and its consequent impact on the industry are stimulating the demand for low-carbon solutions and incentivising building materials manufacturers and suppliers to invest in disclosure, transparency and innovations of materials that reduce carbon emissions of their products.
“This new integration into Bentley's infrastructure digital twin platform exemplifies our strategy to enable our users to achieve the sustainable development goals. Building Transparency's EC3 is a perfect example of open and ecosystem collaboration, whereby the private sector can come together to support and accelerate climate action ”.
Integration with EC3 enables Bentley's digital twin infrastructure solutions, Powered by iTwin, and third-party applications built on Bentley's iTwin platform to simplify and accelerate carbon-based reporting and insights generation. database and on the open-source EC3 carbon calculator and at no additional cost. Bentley's iTwin Platform is an open, scalable, and platform-as-a-service offering that enables developers to create and bring to market solutions that solve real infrastructure problems by leveraging digital twins.
Kaustubh Page, director of product management of Bentley Systems' iTwin platform, said, “We see integration with EC3 as a key feature of Bentley's iTwin platform, which further pushes us towards the platform's sustainability vision. We are pleased to see our users leverage our carbon calculation service on Bentley's iTwin platform to accomplish carbon workflows such as reporting, project optioneering and material selection optimization. We are pleased to integrate an additional life cycle assessment tool to unlock decarbonisation workflows ”.
Microsoft was the first major company to use the built-in carbon calculator (EC3) and is testing the tool (hosted on Microsoft Azure) in its 17-building redevelopment project at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, with the goal of reducing embedded carbon emissions by 30%. We are proud to be an early supporter of EC3 and, at the same time, strategic partners of Bentley Systems, ”said Katie Ross, global sustainability manager for real estate and facilities at Microsoft. "The convergence between the EC3 tool and Bentley's iTwin platform is a great example of how we aim to accelerate sustainability through collaboration and demonstrates the power of data democratization."
Sustainability designers and engineers in the architecture, engineering and construction industries spend a lot of time evaluating or reporting the environmental footprint of infrastructure projects, especially when exporting and manually aggregating data from the counts quantities and bills of materials. It can also be error prone, requiring further verification of successful acquisition by carbon tools. Furthermore, engineering, architecture and construction professionals do not want to be tied to a single carbon calculator, as different calculators can provide different results (e.g. due to uncertainties in environmental product declarations). In addition, carbon reporting and certification requirements differ depending on the project, country or owner of the infrastructure.
The additional integration with EC3 not only saves time with increased accuracy, but also provides uncertainty estimates of EPD data and increases carbon transparency thanks to Building Transparency's open-source / open-access strategy. Users can incorporate technical data created by different design tools into a single view using Bentley's iTwin platform, generate a single report of materials and quantities and share it with different carbon analysis tools - now also with the EC3 - via cloud sync.
One of the common users interested in this new integration is WSP, which applies both the EC3 database and Bentley's iTwin platform to infrastructure projects such as the interstate bridge replacement program. “For WSP, carbon footprint analysis and reduction are imperative in planning, designing, building and operating an infrastructure project from start to finish,” said Thomas Coleman, vice president of WSP USA.
“The ability to improve iTwin's integration with EC3 is a breakthrough for us in several infrastructure projects. Implementing this link will significantly reduce the time and cost of generating detailed EC3-based embodied carbon analyzes and reports in the design and construction phases. In defiIn the long term, we see this collaboration as another step towards an open and evergreen infrastructure digital twin, where carbon computation and optimization are intrinsic and transparent in all phases of the infrastructure lifecycle along the entire value chain.”
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