The GreenPort Congress online session this week previewed and highlighted several of the themes, challenges and solutions which will be front and centre at next month’s annual environmental port conference.
Introducing the webinar – which had over 130 registered attendees – Dr Mark van der Veen, the Director of the Graduate School of Business at Amsterdam Business School who will also chair the 7-9 October event at Portsmouth International Port, said: “Ports are facing so many urgent sustainability and operational challenges today.
“We have to balance decarbonisation, water quality, operational efficiency, managing risks, and ever growing stakeholder expectations, so the need to share practical experiences, learn from one another and collaborate has never been greater.”
As host Port Director, Mike Sellers said he and his team were looking forward to welcoming delegates, as well as taking the opportunity to share their SEACHANGE shore power journey, which passed a major milestone last month when Portsmouth became the first UK port to deliver electricity to multiple vessels at once.
And he added: “The conference itself will be in our sustainable terminal that we built two years ago that uses everything from solar technology to sea water harvesting, to heat it, and to flush the toilets and to cool the air.
“So we are very collaborative and again, you’ll see the work that we’re doing with SMEs, with the university around Net Zero and the projects that we are working through or working towards.”
Chris Poyner, Head of Shore Power at ABB, which played a central role in Portsmouth’s electrification, said the company was active in a variety of projects including “the world’s biggest shore power system” in Rotterdam which would be able to supply 32 vessels simultaneously.
He said: “It’s a massive project which is one we can all follow closely moving forward to show these are some really big sustainability goals that are actually being financed and delivered. And at Greenport we’ll be very thrilled to showcase the new shore power system.”
The annual ESPO environmental report will once again be launched at GreenPort Congress, and the organisation’s Senior Policy Advisor in Sustainable Development, Tim Verhoeven, told the webinar that aside from meeting water quality targets and monitoring pollutants, climate change was increasingly a factor with extreme drought conditions in parts of Europe.
He said: “So we know that it will become more and more difficult to comply with… [regulations], but that means that it brings also a lot of challenges and opportunities as well for different companies to actually post solutions to tackle that.”
The final contribution in the webinar came from Ekaitz Lopez Amurrio, CFO and European Funds Coordinator at Bilbao Port, who made the point that port electrification was not only a technology challenge, but increasingly also a question of system integration and governance.
He added that there was clearly no single energy model for all ports, and each port needed to identify the level of integration that best fitted its own situation.
“So there is not just one solution that fits everyone,” he said. “But what we see is that we can unlock more renewable energy production acting as a community in a collaborative approach, and also being more competitive and getting a better price and more price stability regarding energy, somehow aligning the decarbonisation with competitiveness in our port.
“We have to think what the role of the Port Authority should be in the future and to what extent we have the ambition to orchestrate this model, or risk enough to be a landlord port or electrified port. So we are understanding it as a governance issue, as a governance challenge more than deploying one certain technology or one infrastructure project.”
If you would like to take the opportunity to gain invaluable insights at GreenPort Congress, 7-9 October at Portsmouth International Port, just click here.
