Alibaba Cloud launches carbon management tool for business customers
Energy Expert is a sustainability platform available for Alibaba Cloud customers to quantify and manage carbon emissions
Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group has announced the global launch of Energy Expert, a sustainability SaaS platform to help customers worldwide measure, analyse and manage the carbon emissions of their business activities and products.
The SaaS offers actionable insights and energy saving recommendations for businesses keen to buff up their sustainability credentials.
The initiative is a consequence of Alibaba's own carbon neutrality pledge, unveiled last year. Alibaba has pledged to be carbon neutral in its own operations by 2030 but also to neutralise scope 3 emissions by the same year - a category which includes downstream emissions. Alibaba has pledged to share its energy-efficient technologies with its customers and business partners for the common good. This presents well, although the scope classifications of carbon accounting mean that if Alibaba has any chance of hitting its own target it must help its customers hit theirs.
"Energy Expert is designed to help companies achieve their carbon neutrality goals through advanced technologies and streamlined solutions," said Chen Lijuan, General Manager of Product and Solutions at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. "We hope our proven innovation can be helpful for our global customers to achieve their net zero targets through insightful actions and informed sustainability practices."
Energy Expert helps customers automate the carbon accounting and reporting process at a corporate and product level and obtain real-time sustainability impact statistics for them to make informed decisions. It enables customers to identify the sources of the carbon emissions from their daily business activities as well as the full life cycle of their products, based on the PAS 2060 and ISO 14064 standards on carbon neutrality.
Customers can also quantify their carbon footprint through a prebuilt calculation model leveraging public emission factors datasets and Energy Expert's proprietary datasets. Additionally, it provides visibility into real-time carbon emission patterns and the progress of customer sustainability performance through visualisation dashboards.
The solution also provides analytics on energy efficiency and emission forecasts through deep learning-based AI models hosted on Alibaba Cloud and actionable optimisation plans with recommendations that balance business growth and environmental impacts. Recommendations can include increasing the use of clean energy, reducing excessive electricity consumption during peak times and supply chain optimisation.
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