Cemtech Live Webinar: Latest Trends in Energy Optimisation for the Cement Industry

Hello, and welcome to this Cemtech webinar. My name is Thomas Armstrong. I'm managing editor of International Cement Review, and it's a pleasure to welcome you here today to the cement industry's largest virtual event. in these webinars, we showcase the latest advances from across our industry and promote the best available technologies so that you as producers can move one step closer to manufacturing excellence. As you know, these events are running through the year and are organized by International Cement Review. we are the leading cement industry publication. we publish very our monthly magazine in addition to handbooks.

We have an environmental handbook, cement operations handbook all kinds of newsletters and information coming out on a, on a daily basis. but like we, like, we like to say, if you are here watching this webinar, then please do take a look at International Cement Review online@cnet.com. we think it'd be super relevant to your activities and help you in your work as a cement industry professional. for those of you who are working more on the commercial side, international Cement Review is the leading supplier of statistics to the global cement sector. Our latest product is available today.

It's the global cement market outlook with a forecast to 2027 covering the whole world, but in particular, 50 of the leading markets in great depth. if you already have the global cement report, this is a, an excellent supplement or a standalone report for anyone needing to know what is happening around the world in our industry. A quick word. next week we're gonna be in Seoul in South Korea for Cemtech Asia 2025. it's a really unique opportunity actually, to go and see one of the largest cement sectors in Asia Korea and especially at a time when it's venturing more and more into new technologies particularly in the area of decarbonization.

Of course, we'll be looking at the whole region and hearing from developments across China India, all, all the major areas in the vast and region that are so consequential for our industry. So, hope to see some of you there. if not, don't worry, we'll be in Europe as well. that's gonna be at the end of September. We are returning to Barcelona, one of our favorite host cities for our European conference, our flagship conference every year at this time. and we'll be looking at innovation, efficiency, and competitiveness through vital, critical features of the profitable cement operation.

So if you again, attend our webinars, then do consider coming to one of our in-person events that's coming up later 28th of September, the 1st of October. But for now we are gonna zoom into one particular area. it's a broad area energy optimization for the cement industry. we're delighted to welcome three really interesting speakers who are gonna talk to us about different perspectives for energy optimization. and it's never been more important. energy prices have been at record highs particularly since the start of 2022 coming out of COVID. We had the supply side constraints after that, after the pandemic.

And, and that's been aggravated by the Russian invasion, invasion of Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East. so it's never been more important to find new ways to reduce energy costs. and so that's, you know, one of one of the themes that we're, we're looking to address in this, in this webinar today. So we're gonna hear from Grid Beyond. we're gonna hear from Inform and from Turin free very important companies servicing and providing solutions to the cement sector. and I'm delighted to be able to stop sharing my slides and invite Merko Merko Ferrari to to join us now and, and present his slides. and I'll make a, a short introduction.

Merko is a sales engineer at Turin and energy engineer and a graduate with a master's degree in renewable energy and environmental sustainability from the Polytechnical de Milano in Italy. me is a sales engineer at Turin, as I said, where he's worked since 2020. his particular focus is on energy intensive industries, such as cement, glass, and still production processes. And he's gonna talk to us about the organic blank and psych cycle solutions for a greener and a more profitable spent industry. So, without further ado, I'd like to welcome Marco. The stage is yours. Okay. Thank you very much. good afternoon everyone.

first of all like to thank you, the organizers for the opportunity to be here today, but also thank you to all the audience for taking your time to attend this session. my name is Miko Ferrari, and currently I'm responsible inter boden for the Wasted Recovery application in the energy test industries. And among these industries, we have many of them we have glass factories, we have steel non meta, and also the cement sectors, which is one of the most interesting for us. So today I'd like to give you a brief overview of our company, so with which are the technologies we can offer with a particular focus, of course, on the application of our technology in the cement industry.

so I will work you briefly through short introduction about turbo and organic ranking cycle technology comparison between diversity technology and the more widely known I would say, steam ranking cycle technology. And finally, I share some real world examples of some clients who have already chosen to implement oversee weed recovery plant in their seven plants. So with Turbo is an Italian company which was founded about 40 years ago by Professor Maya professor at Polytechnic of Milan, who spent all his academic here in the research and development of organic ranking cycle technology.

the organic ranking cycle technology was born with the aim to exploit those thermal sources which were too low temperature to be efficiently used by the classic steam ranking cycle technology. So it was it was born to, to exploit basically geothermal energy sources like brine or steam from from the her what the turbo did as the first of its kind was to develop an high temperature or see technology application to exploit medium to eye temperature sources. And this is why nowadays we are let's say the global leader in the market of the medium to eye temperature with the recover replication. Our first plant was installed in 1998. It was a small biomass plant 300 kilowatt.

And our first reference in cement was installed in night bar a plant in Morocco which was a former cement, and now is owned by Heidelberg. And they oversee is still there in operation after 15 years. An important mi milestones for our company is that in 2013 we have been acquired the majority of the shares that were acquired by Mitsubishi Industries. So since then, we can count, let's say on this Japanese gigantic company both on research and development point of view, and both financial. In the last year, we also starting developing new products such as large pumps to produce heat by means of exploiting electricity and gas expander as well. So this was the history of turbo yesterday.

And we see here some numbers of today. And these numbers are just referred to plants that we have in the cement sector. So in cement plants, you see that as of today, we can count on approximately 500, 580,000 hours of operating among all the plants that we have installed, with more than 126 megawatt of sea capacity, installed in 22 different plants in most than 10 different countries worldwide. we've approximately produced 1,600 gigabit hour of electricity from those plants. And this resulted in a more or less 400,000 of tons of CO2 emission avoided by producing the electricity from the wastage of the cement plants instead of producing by alternative means.

as of today, the largest plant that we have installed in cement application is a 13 megawatt unit that we will be starting up in Saudi Arabia for R Cement Company. in addition, let's say to the applications in the cement industry, you see here that we have a worldwide presence, and we have a more than 450 plants installed worldwide in the medium twin temperature applications. each tag that you see here is a plant of ours that you, we can control from from remote, you see that we have presence almost everywhere, but now let's focus on the how you can, let's say, apply there technology and SMM plants. So, in cement plants, there are mostly two type of heaters that you can exploit.

One is the ex exhaust gas from the combustion coming from the brater tower. So after the last cyclone, let's say, of the operator tower. And the second one is the hot air which cools down the clinker. So basically you see that we can recover the energy either from one the other or from both. And we can convey the thermal energy from these two source these two sources to a single OC unit. Having a single or OC unit that exploit both thermal sources allows you to have smaller specific investment for the system because OC is strongly affected by economy of scale. So typically, the larger is the unit, and the lower is the euro per kilowatt of your investment.

So which are the main features of an RC plant? First one is simplicity NRC despite let's say its name is a well-known and proven technology as I said, we have been working with D Rrc for more than 40 years now. there are some plants which are in operation for 15 years in the cement. And it's a unit that can run and operate automatically from the startup to the shutdown without the constant presence of personnel required on site during the plant operation. so everything is controlled automatically by PLC, and you don't need to have additional personal on the power plant while it's working.

as in the case, instead of the steam ranking cycle in RC, you don't need to have water on the plant because organic ranking cycle organic means that we are not using water as a working medium, but we are using an organic fluid. So working fluid, which contains I carbon inside most of application this working fluid will be cyclopentane, especially in the cement application. So, hydrocarbon thanks to this feature let's say you don't need to have water on site to, let's say realize this plant and you don't need to have water treatment as well on on your plant, which is very difficult to manage. And also costly. Another feature is that the RC implies minimal maintenance activities.

later we will see why but basically we have no need of measure overall of the turbine. And we have a very low downtime. Typically, we take about four or five days per year to do some standard maintenance of the unit flexibility because DR Wasco plant is quite easy to integrate on existing industrial processes. In fact we install and the wasted recovery exchanger. So these two pieces of equipment here in bypass to the existing gas treatment line, in order not to have any impact on the cement production process in case of any disturbances on the wasted recovery plant, because you, we know that the heme of a cement producer is to produce cement.

So they don't want that any additional, let's say pieces of equipment can impact their production. let's say this is not the case of NRC. NRC is very flexible, so it can operate from approximately 110% down to 10% of the nominal load. This means that especially in industrial processes where the, let's say the operating condition are not constant you can, they can self adopt the operator, the operation according to the term input which is driven by for instance, the clinical production in that that specific time. or c has a high availability. Statistically, we have an availability, which is higher than 98%.

It means that 98% of the time, if there is heat available to feed, will produce electricity. And also our units shows a long lifetime higher than 20, 25 years. Here you see comparison quick comparison between the steam ranking cycle and the organic ranking cycle. The first things that you can notice is that the shape of the saturation curve of the working fluid is different. So in the case of water, you have this classic bell shape, which is pretty symmetrical while in the case of the organic ranking cycle independently on the working fluid that you select. And we have experience with more than 13 different fluids. the shape of the saturation curve is always like this one.

So with the expansion side which is which is more steep compared to the the eating one. And this has the advantage of having always a dry expansion inside the turbine. So you see here from 0.3 to 0.4 is where you have the expansion inside the turbine. thanks to this feature we have always vapor the outlet of the turbine, and we don't have any time the risk to have liquid formation inside the blades of the turbine. Instead, in case of steam ranking cycle, especially if you don't separate accurately the steam at the of the turbine, you can have a liquid formation inside expansion.

These liquid droplets impacting on the blades of the turbine, which rotates at high speed, can damage the blade of the turbine causing erosion problem and causing the need to, to, to exchange the blade of the turbine. So you see here that on the operation and maintenance point of view on a steam turbine especially if you are frequently working at partial load, you might have a need of periodic measure overall. So, change the blade of the turbine every five, seven years, while in the case of the organic reline cycle turbine, you don't have this need. We typically clean the turbine once every 10 year.

So another difference that you can see is that the enthalpy drop across the turbine is quite limited. So you see here that this has a measur impact on the size. So on the dimension of the turbine, because in the steam turbine, you need to have a lot of number of stages in order to manage this drop. While in the case of the organic ranking cycle turbine the number of stages is a limited from four to six, I would say. And so this drastically reduce the dimension of of the turbine itself and making that more more compact. Here you see comparison of the partial load efficiency when you compare an organic ranking cycle to a steam ranking cycle.

So the yellow one is the line for the steam, and the red one is the one for oversee. So you see that on the excesses, you have the ratio between the actual load and the noal load. So the design's say thermal input for which the turbine was designed. And on the y axis, you have the ratio between the actual efficiency and noal efficiency. You see that c is extremely flexible and efficient partial load, because at 50% of noal input, the RC efficiency is still close to 90% of noal one, while in case of the steam, you drop down to 70%, more or less. If you go even lower, you consider 30% of nominal input.

DRC efficiency is still close to 80% of noal one while deficiency of the steam drops to 50 55%. Another point is that below 2020 5% the steam turbine cannot run anymore because you cannot achieve the good conditions of the steam at day of the turbine in order to avoid liquid formation during the expansion. While DC, as we said, can go down to 10%, this means that even if installed, for instance, one to recover date from two different SD can run, even if one of the K is is down for maintenance, for example, minimizing the downtime of the recovery plant and keeping deficiency at the very high level since at the end your investment is remunerated by the number of kilowatt hour that you produce.

Having a unit that can operate at higher efficiency when working the partial load, which believe me, is 99% of the time in an industrial process, can grant you to generate more kilowatt hour compared to another solution like the stick. Here we have some interesting case studies in cement implants. You see here one of the first a CC unit that we have installed in Turkey. It's an eight megabyte unit, working with an efficiency of approximately 24%, and which is in operation since 2020. Then we have another unit, which we just started up two weeks ago for in its plant ela. this is a unit of eight mega with 25% of efficiency.

And then we have this other unit, which as I said previously will be the largest or c ever installed till today in cement plant in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for a cement company. This is a 12.6 megawatt worth unit with an efficiency of 22%. And this particular unit is the first one that we have which recovers from two different cans, or better two cans of same size, but different in this table. Here you see some of the references that we have in cement implants, you will see three tables. So, as I said, we have 22 references starting from the one in Morocco in 2010. we had some other units in the conent years.

And we see that we have references with basically all the main players in the cement sectors because we have plans for either Berg. We have plans for all team. We have plans for CRH and others, of course. you see also that the size of the system has increased significantly from 2010, where the first unit was a two megawatt unit up, for instance 2025, which is nowadays when, when we have, let's say, the 12.6 mega for company. But as you see our say, unit range, typically from one megawatt up to 13, 14 megawatt from from a single to line. These are just, let's say some other references that we have added in the last few months.

So three contracts for aka in Turkey for example, from let's say three s in three different sites. But the unit will be the same. you know, the site. Another important reference is the one with Sima inorga for the project. Go for Zero. this is a good example of how NORC can be integrated into carbon capture project because in this particular case O sim we have an oxyl in but for the first time d Rrc will run with a standard let's say by hair. And then the same unit without any modification, will, will be also capable to work in oxyl combustion mode without any impact on its performances.

Here we have some possibility as I said on of how since we are, let's say, in a in a mo historic moment where all cements, most of the cements producer are focused on the carbon capture process. this slide is just to provide a proof that test your board.

And we can support you also in that, because, as I said, when we have a technologies such as re combustion or calcium looping where you still have a possibility to recover thermal energy prior the ceto capture two stage, you can still have wasted recovery using an rrc while in other technologies which are end of thermal, such as CTU capture capture with Amin we have also the possibility to provide a large heat pumps to produce heat in form of steam in order to use this inside the disorder to regenerate the immune solution. And I wanted also to add that being part of Mitsubishi the industries.

we can also say provide you the, the possibility to get in contact with MHI, which is which has, let's say it's patented carbon capture process with amine. another important thing that I wanted to add is that in inter boden, we just not design manufacturer and supply the plant. But we have also very strong after sales service department composed of approximately 55 engineers which are dedicated exclusively to the assistance of the customer, both from remote and also with mission on site with the aim to always optimize the performances of the plant.

Also after the installation, it means that if after some years, some weeks, the the plant the cement plant change some parameters on the production. So the input changes our team can support you to make modification on the software or propose revamping alternative of, of the units always try to maximize the efficiency of the system even after many years of per. Just to conclude this, the point that we would like you to have in mind after after the presentation. The first one is that oversee now is a very proven technology. So it's nothing TRL two or three, but it's really a technology which has been used in many, many plants worldwide.

we have more than 40 years of experience, and we deliver a reliable and optimized solution to announce the energy efficiency of each different industrial customer plans. focus on your process, because as I said, there c is a completely automated via PC, and there's no requirement from the cement personnel to say put effort on managing the waste recovery plant because this is not the aim of cement producer lower opex, because once you have installed diversity, you have significantly lower operational expenses compared to other technologies like steam ranking cycle.

And these maximize the long-term le long-term savings because, for instance, as I said, you don't have to make challenging and very costly water treatment for the water to be put in the steamer ranking cycle, for instance smaller footprint. So we are in industrial plants so many time the space available is a big constraint. But if you compare diversity waste recovery plant with other green technologies such as solar or winds, you will find out that sea requires significantly less space for each megawatt compared to the one that the other technologies requires. And it is also independent on the weather condition.

So you are sure that if you have the thermal power available, it, it means that if your kidney is running, D SEA will be producing electricity, water saving, so turbo can turbo Earth can operate without any need of water. And it is very ideal for those regions where water is very scarce and it's a very rare source. I want to repeat that. turbo is turbo are very flexible and can operate across a very wide load range, self self adapting to the process fluctuation on the kin. And again we have dedicated after sales service department which is there just to, to support you and to maximize the performances of the unit in any condition.

nowadays say is a ready technology that can be implemented in day zero to help the industrial sector to reach the, the targets which be set by the by the U. So, and this is already technology, you don't have to wait to see which one is better. this is well proven and worked since 40 years. So say, this is was all for my presentation. If you have any question, please feel free to ask or contact me directly. You have my contacts here. Thank you. Thank you very much, moko. That was a, a great overview of or technology. Very interesting. And also interesting to note the evolution of the technology over the last decade or so.

It is really it's really like you, like you've shown increased in scale, the 12, 13 megawatts now up from two. it's, it's flexible. You are, you're trying it on a carbon capture, you're trying it on two kilns. so it, it seems like it's a, it's a really much more mature technology. I see there's different financing options. one of the references was a, em working with nl. I, I, I assume that the the unit's been built at the EM plant, but it's a, an offtake or some kind of finance agreement around that. Yeah, In that specific plant we are building the, the We Recovery plant together with our partners, but analytics is investing directly on the project.

So there is a, let's say a PPA agreement between analytics and and co to sell the electricity produce at a certain price for, for a certain amount of time. And this is not the only reference that we have in such in such schema because in a few weeks we will be starting up a unit in the Emirates 10 megawatt unit for lafarge or sim. And in that specific case we are building the waste recovery plant with an g as investors. Yeah. So different combinations, different ways of, of financing electricity. and that's very interesting to, to highlight.

I, I guess the main question that I'm seeing from from viewers and listeners is what are the organic fluids used why they chosen can, can you speak a little bit around that? Yeah, I mean, there are different organic fluids that we can work with for smaller units. I would say approximately up to 1.52 megawatt of gross power output.

We have a standardized solution which works with suboxane which is let's say an organic oil either MM or MDM depending on the application, while for units above two megawatt or gross power output, we typically work with cyclopentane, as I said, because according to our experience the temperature profile of the IT source so the exo gas from the ator and the OTA from the clean cooler, it really well with the saturation curve of the sapen. And that's why this is the mostly used fluid in in all of our high temperature application IT recovery. Okay, that's great. Well, there are a few more questions in the q and a box if you'd like to look at them and answer them later.

But for now that's all we have time for. Thank you very much. Merko Ferrari from Turbid. Thank you. Thank you, Rob. Thanks. Great. like I said there's a, a, a Q and a button on your Zoom toolbar. just press that and type in a any questions for the speakers as they come to you. And I'll either pick them up or one of the speakers because they can they can type in their answers later. But for now we're gonna move on to our next presentation, which is from fee Norbert from inform welcome fee. first time I think to speak on the EC webinar FIS and experts in digital transformation and optimization of logistics processes.

She holds a master's degree in information systems from the University of Cologne. She joined inform a German based AI software company in 2019. In her current role as a consultant. She supports cement and ready mix producers around the world in optimizing their logistics performance. A key milestone in her career has been the rollout of logistics optimization software projects for a major international cement producer across several European countries. So we have someone with great practical experience here now, ready to talk about unlocking hidden energy savings in cement logistics. Over to you Fi Hi.

Yeah, thank you for your warm introduction and thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. we all know that the rot to net zero is long and costly, especially when it comes to the process side of the cement industry, but there is one area where we often overlook quicks, and that's the logistics and transport. And today I would like to talk to you about unlocking those hidden energy savings in the semantical logistics. But first before diving deep into the topic, I would like to take a moment and introduce you to our company, inform, inform everything is about AI and digital decision making. We are a software company with more than 1000 employees.

Our headquarter is located in Aen in Germany, but as you can see in my background, we have offices all around the world. And now digital decision making might sound a little abstract first. So let me share a few examples of how you might have already benefited from our software products without even realizing it. Saturday today we are on a richer conference, but imagine for a moment this would be an onsite event, then most of us would have taken a plane flying to the event. And as the airport grant operations of many airports around the world are operated based on informed AI supported software, you may have benefited from those without even noticing it.

And now, after landing at the airport, you may use your credit card to rent a car or pay the conference hotel. And here we can interact with inform software. Again, our AI-based risk and fraud software solutions are protecting more than 70 million banking and mobile accounts and maybe also yours, but let me get back to the focus for today. Inform activities in the building material logistics. So here we are using AI based software tools to support your strategical and technical planning activities, as well as your daily logistics operations. So when we want to find the shortest route to our destination, that's easy.

Nowadays, we all have like a route planner in our pockets or a navigation system in our cars, but it gets way more complicated when you have a fleet of vehicles and each of the vehicle has to make several deliveries each day. So what other truck assignment and route combination will offer you the lowest empty mileage? We humans are creatives of routines. So when we establish routines, we can carry out tasks a lot faster since we don't have to think about it or prepare for it. And for an experience planner choosing the closest following up job premises to be a pretty good routine that will deliver quick results.

So we can see here in my example on the slide that we have two tracks for plants and for construction site, an experienced planner would probably send the tracks to the nearest plant and then to the nearest construction site to the next plant, enter the next construction site. In this picture here, we can see the empty mileage of the tracks marked in direct color. But what if the planner would take the time, sit down and calculate through all of the possible options, he may come up with a better result. And this is where our AI algorithms come into the game. So in the second picture here, we see the same example with two track for plants and for construction sites.

But we can directly notice that the first empty approach one of the trucks is different than to the one of the experienced plan planner, and it's longer, but in the end, this will play out as we can reduce the mileages by 19% because the optimization can see the whole picture while the planner has not enough time to go through all of it. And our AI agreements enabled the dispatchers and planners to do complex and time critical calculations easily and quick. So we do not only reduce the EM to empty mileages, but also we increased loads per trucks and day. And with that we need fewer trucks overall.

And this results in reducing the logistics costs and as well reducing the CO2 emissions along the way. But how big is the impact? So we like to say it's too big to ignore. In Germany, for example, the total road transmit volume is roughly 5 billion tons. 25% of that were cement aggregates, limestone ready mix, and other construction industry related materials. So if you look at the overall transport volume at the building materials industry, the logistics of our sector has a big footprint compared to other industries. But how can we lower your logistic footprint with the help of ai deterrent? Fraud planning process is typically split into three different stages.

The first one is the strategic planning. This normally takes place every few months and addresses questions around your distribution network. For example, how many trucks should I buy? The second one is the tactical planning process. The tactical planning typically takes place the day before the order execution and at aims at figuring out the best setting to balance your cost and fuel consumption on the one side and the service level on the other side. So coming back to the number of trucks, the question here would be how many trucks to use for that specific day? And the third stage is the related to the daily operations with the real time shadowing as a core element.

So first I would like to dive a little bit deeper into the strategic planning. The goal here is to identify the most cost and energy efficient supply network related questions are, for example, should I close, open or move any of my plans? How many trucks do I need to fulfill my demand that I expect in the future? And to answer these questions, AI based algorithms can be fed with information on your plans, your demand distribution, your transportation distances, capacities, et cetera. And then we get the typical outcome, which we can see here in the right picture. Don't be confused, that's like ready mix example.

But the same principle and techniques can be used for cement and aggregate distribution networks as well. The pictures we are seeing are from a simulation we conducted last year, and on the left part of the picture, we are seeing the SS situation for the demand for fulfillment. Every dot on the picture indicates a customer, and the color of the.is the plant which has been used to fulfill the demand. So we can see here from the left picture the as is deliveries to the right picture, what would be the result if we optimize the network? But now what does that mean in numbers? So the table here, shes the results of the same network simulation in numbers. So it's again, ready mixed.

But as the real numbers are like of course, confidential, I only use the related ones but I think they should illustrate the added value as well. So we can see here the results for the travel distance, the travel costs, the fixed plan costs, the production costs, and the total costs for the initial situation, they are of course all 100%. But if we now compare these results with the network optimization, then we can see that in this specific scenario, the average cost cost to fulfill demand, the demand could be some reduced by something around 16 to 17%.

So this approach of optimizing your network distribution gives you a nice opportunity to compare different setups as a basis for your future investment decisions. So this was the first stage. Now I would like to go to the second stage, the tactical planning, or we call it pre-planning. So here we can see the pre-planning mode of our software, Roche. At the bottom left side here, we see information on our track fleet, and on the right side here, we see information on our orders. At the top here we see a gun chart, and which each line represents one track. And then here we have the timetable over the day, we can now ask, Hey, what's the best track shadow for tomorrow?

By click this little button there. And then Sanus comes up with a plan. So now we see that the gun chart here is filled with deliveries, which are represented by the green and purple bars. This gives us transparency over the whole transport plan as we can see it for the whole track fleet. And we can also play around with it. So we can make changes to, for example, our track fleet by increasing or decreasing the number of trucks and to our order book by changing, for example, delivery times, et cetera. And this way we can then create several different scenarios. In the next step, we would like to evaluate those scenarios, and we do this by calculating KPIs.

So in this KPIs we have various different indicators. For example, the total quantity or the total number of deliveries, which is in the transport plan, the number of deliveries per truck for that day on average downloaded an empty mileage. And the plan on time performance, we can now compare the KPIs of those scenarios and can decide which transport plan we would like to execute tomorrow. For this decision, it's important to know our goals. So how should the balance between the productivity of the trucks, so the loads per truck, per day, and the service level as the on-time performance be. And for that, I have a little diagram here.

We can see on the XA axis, we have the service level, which is reflected as the on time and perce percentage. So how many of our deliveries are on time at the construction site, on the X axis, we see delos per track per day. This represents our productivity. And then we have the dots here in the middle, which each represents a transfer plan and the balance of this transfer plan between service level and productivity, we now have to define an area at which we aim to execute. This area is here reflected as the parallel, and it's usually defined by the management. Our short, short term goal is now to create a transport plan that fits into this parallelogram.

And with the opportunity to do different scenarios in our software, we can figure that out. Then in the long term, we have to go to move the parallelogram to more on time performance and more loads per truck per day. This usually comes with more experience improvements in the order book management, identifying pain points and addressing them and changing processes, et cetera. So the last stage are the daily operations, and I would like to dive into them. Now. In the middle we can see our AI supported dispatching tool. This is integrated into a landscape with other software tools. So we get our order data and all changes regarding the orders from an ERP or order taking tool.

And then with our transport plans, we communicate the ticket data to the telematics. So as soon as we assign something, we send to the telematics the instructions for the drivers, and we can communicate with the drivers to this integration as well. And besides of that, we send the ticket data to the ERP or order entry system so that they can communicate with the vetting system. We also get from the telematics system the updates on the position and statuses of the trucks so that our software is always fed with UpToDate information and can adjust the transfer plan to all the changes that may occur in the real time execution.

So we can come up with a new plan every minute if there are changes so that they are fed in. Okay, so now let's summarize the benefits that you can get with an IE based software tool. So we can increase the utilization of the trucks in terms of the time and the capacity we schedule across multiple different sites, and our software provides an immediate reaction to ad hoc changes in the real time execution. And besides of that, we increased the transfer transparency and accountability. But of course, the increased productivity changes on and various across the different business lines.

So in the ready mixed business, we achieved the biggest increase as the travel durations are the shortest, and the trucks transport several deliveries per day. So here is the most optimization potential, which is 10 to 37% of productivity increase. In the aggregate business, it's nine to 79%, and in the cement business it's seven to 21%. Now, you may ask yourself, okay, what does that mean for the return on investment? I have some brought you an example from a simulation study that we did in the APAC region.

So what we can see here in the table are the results without optimization and with optimization, the total volume in cubics that were transported for the year are the same as we are working with the same order book, the average track productivity per day. So the average quantity data track us per goes from 24.1 cubics without optimization up to 30 cubics with optimization. That's an increase in productivity of 24.5%, and we can calculate that for the whole year. There we go up from 5,900 to 7,300 cubics. We can now calculate that into costs.

So without optimization in this example, the logistic cost per year were 9.6, 9.6 million, but with optimization, we can decrease that to 7.4 million euros. That's a saving for the year of 2.2 million euros. And this saving is recurring. So this can be achieved every year, and it's in person. We are talking about 22.9%. So now you may ask yourself, does this all make sense for my business? How would this apply to my individual situation? And to answer that question, we offer a service in which we evaluate your individual benefit, therefore we take your order book your truck information, your plant data, and your individual transport requirements.

And with that, we then create two different plans. The first one is the manual plan, which is the recreation of what you did in reality on the day. And the second one is the optimize plan. For the optimized plan, we use the same input data that you used for your manual plan. Then we can create KPI sets for both of the plans. And with those, those KPI sets, we can calculate your individual return on investment. Yeah, and with that, we come to the end of my talk. I hope I could give you a little impression of how we at infor embark the road to net zero and making your logistics more efficient and CO2 friendly. I wanna dive deeper. Feel free to contact me.

I'm happy to discuss anything with you in more detail and yeah, otherwise we can switch to the questions. Well, thank you very much. V that was a, a great overview of informs ai software solutions for logistics which are often overlooked, but such, like you pointed out a a considerable costs expense for the industry, but also a considerable emitter of, of carbon dioxide. these these cost savings are also energy savings, are also emission savings. So it's a, a really valuable tool. and like you said easy to to find out whether it's applicable for, for a company.

out of interest what, you know, in, in the cement sector, what are, what kind of scale of company and of logistic logistics activity are you looking at where, where you can become useful, where your product can become useful? How many trucks or how many points or of delivery? do you have a kind of sort of scale that's optimum? Yeah, so we usually go by trucks and in our experience, it starts to give you a true benefit from like 50 trucks on. yeah, maybe it's meant a little bit more. And yeah, we don't have like a higher range. yeah, but under the number we there's no not enough optimization potential to really see the benefit. So, yeah.

And, and how is the software actually as it interface with the other sort of ERP systems, the other company systems that are being run at the same time is that process of integrating it very complicated and lengthy? can you talk a bit around that? Yeah, so we already have interfaces with a lot of different ERP providers and telematics providers. so if you're lucky, then we maybe have it already for your ERP and telematics provider. but if not, then it approximately takes up with all of the discussion discussions in beforehand, et cetera, to three months to get the interfaces ready. Yeah, okay.

But some of them are off the shelf because you've already worked with them and, and you know how to onboard it quickly. well that's a, that's a fascinating presentation very clear value and hopefully of interest to our viewers too. So fi thank you very much for that presentation. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Good. Okay. So we're gonna move in a slightly different direction now. and I'm pleased to introduce our next speaker, Nick Gey business development director from Grid Beyond.

Nick's a member of Grid beyond's North American business development team, where he leads strategic initiatives to strengthen client relationships and support commercial industrial customers participating in demand response, demand management, and real time price avoidance programs. He's focused on maximizing program performance, delivering outstanding customer service, and helping clients boost bottom line revenue without sacrificing operational goals with a decade of experience in the energy sector. Nick previously led the North American Demand Response Account Management Team at NLX.

He has a, he holds a bachelor of science degree from the University of Vermont, and he's, he's speaking to us today about optimizing cement energy strategies. So, Nick, please the floor is yours. Yeah, thank you Thomas. And thank you everyone who's taken the time outta their day to be with us here today. So, as Thomas outlines I am coming from Grid Beyond and to give everyone an overview of what we're gonna be talking about today just gonna give a brief overview of, you know, who we are here at Grid beyond where we're coming from and where we're going. We're gonna be talking about the evolution of demand response and energy curtailment programs.

These are for those unfamiliar, these are programs where we can enroll your cement facilities into demand side response programs where we are paying your facilities for demonstrating their flexibility during an extreme energy event. We'll talk specifically how we do this for cement plants and take a quick review of, you know, what our software is doing to allow for your plans to have sophisticated curtailment strategies without necessarily impacting your core production. And then, if any of this is to interest anyone on this call I'd love to look at future opportunities with, with every and, and, and anyone.

so we'll talk through, you know, what that looks like, but just a little bit about Grid Beyond. so we are a controls and automation company that was founded in 2010. And controls and automation are at our core, it's in our DNA that is what we're doing here today. We started in 2010 because we found a, a niche and industry where there were a lot of industrial and commercial customers who wanted to have sophisticated controls installed on their equipment to know not necessarily, you know, what is the output of this piece of machinery, but more how can we have this piece of equipment running more efficiently? And we filled that niche over the past decade.

This quickly evolved to overlaying this controls and automation experience into the energy market curtailment programs where, again, we're paying large manufacturers for curtailing site load, commonly called demand response. And what we're doing now is we are combining our controls and hardware background with our predictive machine learning models to create a ecosystem for customers to seamlessly participate in these energy curtailment programs.

We have the ability to autonomize these energy curtailment strategies as well and provide platforms and software for your facilities to see what specific grid curtailment programs you are going to be enrolled in, not necessarily for that given year or that given month not even that given day, but down to the individual hour. Where is the most opportunity for your flexible load or when it makes sense for your plants? We currently have over 2.3 gigawatts of load under our portfolio.

we do operations in Europe, Australia, Japan as well as the key markets here in the US being Texas, PJM California, and then later this year new England and New York in terms of the, the products that we have here at Grid, beyond helping to meet any of your plants where they are today if you're operating at a hundred percent capacity all the time and you say there's absolutely no way you can turn off our energy curtailment programs, we have solutions for you if you operate at 50% capacity, 85% capacity, we're here to meet you where you are today. And so you know, the, the, the biggest market that we're in right now is with our Smart Demand side response solutions.

So again, this is where we're paying commercial and industrial customers for demonstrating the flexibility and curtailing during severe grid constraint. We're also enrolling customers in peak management services. So either your, your ISO or your grid operator or your local utility, everyone has to pay for your contribution to utility and grid peaks. And we have the ability to notify you for when these peaks are going to take place to help you save on energy costs. In terms of the, the backbone of, of how we're enrolling customers in these programs, we give you full ability to view and monitor our market forecasts.

So if running during high priced hours is a, something of a, a cheap concern for a lot of folks on the, on the call today, you know, we can set up a call to look at what do our forecasts look like? How do they show you when these high price volatile hours are happening, and what should your bid strategy be for realtime price avoidance or for demand response or for peak shaving? So we give you the ability to view all of these forecasts, which are leveraging our AI data models to tell you what are the most opportune times for your plant not to run, to run, and at what capacity should you be running at?

And then for the folks on the call today who are running at a hundred percent capacity, you know, here at Grid beyond, we have the ability to wholly finance a battery storage system for your facility.

so in addition to battery storage, we're also looking at if you have CO2 goals to get to net zero if you have electric vehicle fleet charging, we have the ability to inter interlay our energy management system on top of existing infrastructure that already exists to give them visibility into energy market access to enroll in our Smart Demands, demand side response programs in terms of, you know, how, how this all works here at Grid Beyond and, and what are we doing differently for folks who are familiar with demand response, traditional demand response, we sort of call it old school demand response is you know, GR or demand response companies would be asking you guys to essentially do a site shutdown or a service account shut down.

And just with today's production and manufacturers operating at raise within margins, we know here at Grid beyond that, a full plant shutdown is not in the cards for what you guys can realistically expect. And so what we're doing here at Grid Beyond is when we're targeting smart curtailment to optimize in energy markets, we are targeting sub-meter asset level pieces of equipment, so individual large energy equipment instead of asking for a, a full site shutdown. And what we're doing is when we enroll these assets into these energy markets, we, we create what we call a digital twin, where we model the data that we're taking from this individual piece of equipment.

Know at what capacity is this piece of equipment running at, where is there flexibility and which programs make the most sense based off the data models that we're pulling from this piece of equipment? Important to say, when we are on site working with your facilities and we are installing equipment, our equipment is not tapping into your own IT network. We have our own SIM card, our own firmware on firewalls. So it's totally segregated from your own IT network still allowing for us to, to gather data for what these pieces of equipment are using.

Once we have the data for the individual pieces of equipment, we then work with each individual plant to fully understand what are the production targets for this specific plants, what are the asset parameters for this individual piece of equipment? And then we overlay that information with our market forecasts to come up with an optimized schedule or your specific facility to say, if there's a peak that's being forecasted today, this is what the plan should do, and here's the expected savings on the bill by not running your plan at a hundred percent capacity during this peak. The same logic stands true for demand response as well.

So if there is an emergency event on the grid or if there's a price response on the grid, we would give you the schedule for when our forecasts are modeling this specific event, and you would be paid for demonstrating your curtailment during that event. To give you guys all an understanding of, you know, how we have specific software and operation setup specifically for cement manufacturers across the cement production schedule. You know, obviously we have Crutcher mixers, raw mills, the kiln cement mill, and the bulk cement production. What we're doing is, again, we like to target upstream assets for curtailment in energy markets without necessarily jeopardizing downstream production.

And so a key example here is when we look at the raw mill silo, we're thinking of this raw mill silo as almost as a, as a battery. This silo has a maximum capacity of raw meal that it can hold. It also has a minimum threshold for how much raw meal this can hold. And as long as the silo somewhere in the middle between that the, the cap and the minimum, there's no reason why that raw meal cannot continue feeding into the kiln to create clinker and allow for upstream assets like the crusher, the mixer, and the raw meal to curtail, to earn revenue in these grid curtailment programs while still allowing for downstream production to take place.

And so what we do in this specific instance is we would install a sensor on the individual silos themselves. And again, as long as you're within that band of the maximum capacity and the minimum capacity, we would enroll the upstream assets, the pressure mixer and raw mill into these energy curtailment programs. Just an example of a very sophisticated solution for what we're doing differently at here at Grid Beyond in targeting upstream assets for curtailment without affecting downstream production. it's also worth mentioning here, I've also touched on how when we install hardware on site, we are you know, we have our own SIM card, our own firewall.

We're not integrating with your IT network if you, if your plants, we commonly find that most cement manufacturers, they already have their own data systems, their own BMS, their own PLCs set up. We have the ability to integrate with existing infrastructure that's already set up today, as well as if you do not have this existing infrastructure set up today, we can implement this for you. So the real goal is once we have the facility curtailing for these energy market programs, we're using our data science background to come up with an optimized schedule for the facility.

We're using our operational data to make daily recommendations for which programs and which opportunities make the most sense for each specific plan. And then we're leveraging our controls and hardware background, which I kick off this call talking about to fully automate all of these solutions. And so at a, at a full picture, what we're doing is creating a digital twin model for your individual plans to say, which market opportunities make the most sense based off the data that we're pulling from the heavy industrial pieces of equipment, we are then coming up with an optimized strategy for, and this is coming off of your, your individual site data, or what are your production targets?

What are your asset parameters? What are the temperatures, the storage levels that we need to take into consideration to build this optimized schedule? Once we have the schedule built for you, we then build out a dashboard where we can have weekly, daily, hourly recommendations so that, you know, specifically when is it not economical for my plant to be running at a hundred percent capacity? When are there high price hours on the grid where I'm exposed to as a commercial industrial customer? And it makes sense for me to draw back some of the power and sell it back to the grid so that you're not exposed to those very high priced events with the ultimate goal of optimizing revenue.

So getting paid for demonstrating and selling your electricity back to the grid operators, as well as saving on your utility bill. So if you're not running during these peak load hours that every TSO ISO utility has, you will recognize on the bill savings on your utility bill. And so, you know, when I'm on these calls, I often want to know, okay, how does this work? This all sounds fantastic, but in real practice, what does this look like to give everyone on a call a a little snapshot of what our software is doing? On the top side here, the purple line is the actual raw mill load profile. The teal line is the recommended strategy.

So in a perfect world, what would we recommend the load for the raw mill to be doing? And then this yellow line is indicative of what is the pricing that's occurring on the grid. The bottom here is where you have our sensor installed on one of your raw mill silos, where you have the maximum threshold for the raw mill silo set at 5,500 tons. You have the minimum of threshold set at 4,700 tons, and then you have the forecasted capacity. So where do we expect the silo capacity to be at that given hour?

And so what you can see here on the top is we are forecasting a, a price spike to take place at 7:00 AM And what our model is saying is, in a perfect world, you would curtail your energy use during this high priced event in order to not be exposed to that high pricing. But if you look at the bottom here, our forecast and capacity for the silo is not at a level that's high enough where we would actually curtail the raw mill. Again, we only want to curtail the raw mill, the crusher, the mixer, if and only if there's enough capacity in the silo to allow for downstream production to take place, which is why we're not seeing actual curtailment at the raw mill.

Even with the high priced event later in the afternoon, you can see another price flight take place at 1800 here, our optimized raw mill load profile of saying, okay, we do want you to curtail during this event, just like we wanted you to curtail earlier in the day. And as you can see down below here, you can see a gradual decline in the forecast of capacity, which means, okay, there's enough capacity in the raw mill silo to cover the downstream production in the clinker to, to take place. And so again, we are developing and optimizing your facilities to participate in these programs if and only if, if it makes sense.

And the way that we're doing that today is by measuring the capacity on, on your silos with the end goal to create daily recommendations based off our predictive models for when it is it extremely profitable for your plant to be running. So when the, the, the price for energy is low, you want to be running as close to a hundred percent as possible. Whereas if there's a forecasted price spike, you know, you want to draw back some of your power to sell that back to the grid. and again, just to really hit on, you know, there's a lot of moving pieces around these models, these algorithms curtailing and not curtailing.

We have the ability to fully automate all of these curtailment strategies so that it gets to a point where every morning your plant operator is logging into our portal, they will see the schedule that we are forecasting for these curtailment strategies. Every single plant will have the ability to say, no, I choose not to participate in this load she event, but if they choose to participate, this will all happen autonomously.

And so for anyone on the call that is interested in looking at future opportunities for demand response, if, if you've worked in demand response, peak avoidance or real time price avoidance, and you're currently doing that today, I promise you that we are doing things very differently here at Grid beyond. And so simply put, if there's any future you know, opportunities that we wanna look at together for what could my plant be doing to increase bottom line revenue in demand side response programs in peak avoidance in real time price avoidance, this is what the process will look like.

So simply put, we would take your historical data or, and we would request a letter of authorization from your local utility or grid operator model and gather all of your interval meter data. We would then pull in your production data for your plant to build and optimize strategy that would look at what is the data ahead forecast for my specific market? What is the price spikes that we're forecasting for my given market and pull in the real time prices and the process constraints to build and optimize schedule again for when is it the most profitable for my plan to run? And when should I be drawing back power to not be exposed to extreme price spikes?

That is everything that I had to present today. And I wanna say thank you to everyone again for joining the call. promise I'll, I'll pass this back over to you to see if there are any questions that are top of mind Now. That's a great presentation. first of that, that kind that we've, we've had on our webinars and it makes a lot of sense. I understand that you've, you've, you've done that in the uk. how, how many plants are, are currently participating in this kind of scheme?

Yeah so we currently have over 15 plants participating in these schemes with the, the biggest ones being tarmac or CRH Cemex, Saint Cobain Erris Penn C Supply being the, the key mark accounts that we're working with today to optimize their energy strategy. And I, you know, it it makes it so much sense. I think people who have EVs electric cars are probably familiar with this kind of technology, even even domestically. certainly in the uk. you know, you can download your app and optimize the, the charging of your car. So it makes, you know, perfect sense to do that on a huge, hugely power hungry industrial process like cement manufacturing.

can you give us a little bit of an idea of the hardware that you need to put into a plant? you know, this, these sensors, this kind of thing. Is that a very big process? how does that work? Yeah, I think you know, every, every plant is unique in how they operate. I'd say at a very high level, most plants today have a central building like A BMS or a SCADA system where they are monitoring the output for each individual piece of equipment. And so if that exists today it is not a very involved process.

You know, we would get on site with one of our contractors, we would talk through what the enablement process would look like, and you're looking at a, you know, a, a a daily install to get our equipment installed to, to feed into your existing systems on the, the other side of that, on the indi install, installing individual equipment on heavy, you know, crutches, mixers in the raw mill. That would be a more involved process where we would need to work with individual engineers on site to figure out you know, where should we tie this into? What what specific parameters do we need to be thinking about to implement this install? Does it need to be fully offline?

Obviously safety is a big concern. so it's, I'd say it's much more involved on the individual asset level. And can I, can I, can you quantify in any way what, what kind of savings you know, can a plant make or what's the kind of scale of these savings? Is there any kind of rule or thumb or indication you can give us? Yeah, I'd say like in, in here in the United States, you're looking at anywhere from $60,000 per megawatt all the way up to a hundred thousand dollars per megawatt. I'd say in the uk that's a very similar price model to give.

And then as the plants graduate up to more sophisticated demand response programs, so faster responding programs, prices can go up anywhere to, you know, $120,000 per megawatt to $150,000 per megawatts. So has the potential to be quite lucrative depending on how flexible plants can be. Okay. So if a plant is operating at maximum capacity, it's not gonna have that ability to modulate its its activity. But obviously if you are operating at 70%, then it, then it could make a lot of sense. Yes. Yeah. Well but if you're set operating at full capacity, maybe you've got a good price and it has other, other benefits. So very, it's a very interesting proposition that you, you've presented.

I'm absolutely certain it's relevant to every single cement plant operator here today. and so hopefully more of you will, will investigate. Nick Guray, thank you very much from Grid Beyond excellent presentation. And that concludes our, our session on energy optimization today. I think we've had three fantastic presentations really well presented and solutions that make a lot of sense for our activities in, in the industry. So thanks to moko, Nick and Fi for their presentations. if you wanna get in touch with them, you can do so. We'll be circulating all the presentations after the webinar and they'll have their contact details, et cetera on them. that's all for, for now.

We'll be back next month with our next webinar on Carbon Capture looking at the future of emissions control for the cement industry. some very important presentations for that webinar. before then we'll be in Korea. and as well as that, you've got the June issue of International Cement Review, which is just out go to subnet.com if you wanna have a look at that or subscribe. So thank you very much. have a, a good rest of your day and rest of your week. we'll see you next time. That's all for now, from Ctech. Goodbye.