Why is it so important to reduce CO2 and become sustainable? Quite simply: because it is about our future and that of future generations. This requires new, sustainable products and solutions. Industrial production in particular plays an important role in this, as it accounts for one fifth of total CO2 emissions in Germany.

Challenges and opportunities of decarbonization

Decarbonization – the switch from fossil fuels to CO2-neutral and renewable energy sources – is inevitable. And this must affect all sectors and industries, not just the automotive industry. This is because fossil fuels currently account for only about half of the world’s oil consumption and less than 15 percent of total consumption.

The impact of ongoing decarbonization will therefore also massively affect and change other areas, including:

  • Sustainable manufacturing and production processes, intelligent automation solutions
  • New technologies for the generation, storage and distribution of energy
  • Power grids and network structures
  • The role of oil and gas states
  • Interests of multinational energy companies

Batteries as a key technology for decarbonization

A challenge in the use of renewable energy sources such as hydropower, wind energy, photovoltaics or biomass, which are mainly used to generate electricity: While the matter-bound fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas can be easily stored and used flexibly only when needed, there must always be a balance between electricity feed-in and electricity consumption in a power grid. However, renewable energy contributions are made when the wind blows or the sun shines – and not necessarily when the energy is needed by the consumer.

To be able to establish a balance between electricity supply and demand, electricity storage systems are needed that can absorb electrical energy quickly, flexibly and in a scalable manner, but can also feed it back into the grid. Lithium-ion batteries are ideally suited for this purpose and are thus becoming a key technology for the large-scale use of renewable energies and thus for decarbonization itself.

Batteries itself can even made more sustainable when using recycled material from end-of-life batteries or reducing the CO2 emissions of the battery production with intelligent automation solutions.

Using Europe as a production location

Especially for technology companies and medium-sized companies in the leading industrial nations, European countries are once again gaining importance as production locations. This is also supported by politicians. For example, through the ‘EU Chip Act’ staged by the European Commission: This new law aims to increase the share of computer chips produced in the European Union with subsidies of 43 billion euros.

However, these considerations also mean that production is once again increasingly located in regions with higher labor costs and a demographic change. To remain competitive and take full advantage of the opportunities offered by decarbonization, the degree of automation must increase to keep Europe attractive as production base on a global level. This means that reliable and efficient automation technology will be even more important than in the past.
With many years of know-how, KUKA offers suitable components and automation solutions  for the battery value chain.

Source: KUKA

Global competitiveness through automation and quality

High quality in Europe as an industrial location can only work ecologically and economically if production is automated as much as possible – through appropriate systems and machines.

High quality pays off. In the future, customers will decide on reliable and sustainable products even more. But what does sustainability of a product mean? Besides the possibility of complete recycling, the use of materials, also the use of energy during production must be considered. With the appropriate technologies, this can be reduced. In addition, high-quality production ensures lower waste and longer product life. This improves both ecological and economic use. In some cases, even seriously: In the production of battery cells, for example, every percent of avoided waste in a 10.5 GWh factory per year corresponds to a saving of 5 million euros and 8,000 tons of CO2 equivalent.

A doubled service life also halves the costs and the CO2 footprint, which is proportionately attributable to the cost of use from production costs. With this, refurbished and second-life products used in production are raising attractiveness as their CO2 footprint is tremendously low and nearly impossible to be topped by new produced products. With refurbishment-services, old products get a second-life and quality guarantee.

Even software has a big potential of optimization and energy reduction. For Example: depending on the path programming of a robot, the energy consumption can be optimized up to 30%. Even the peak power can be reduced, which enables a simplification of the factory power grid.

Source: KUKA

High-quality and sustainable automation also allows us to remain globally competitive in Europe and North America. The following points play an important role in this:

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Thomas Schmidberger

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