Fireside Chat: Going green in the cold chain requires numerous KPIs

'It's easy to get the first 20%, it's really hard to get the next 5, 10 and 20% of energy reductions,' says Ndustrial CEO

This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Net-Zero Carbon Summit on Wednesday.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Decarbonizing the cold chain by addressing energy intensity with Ndustrial

DETAILS: Jason Massey, CEO of Ndustrial, an AI-powered energy intensity platform for the $60B industrial market, and FreightWaves group lead Brielle Jaekel will discuss the cold chain challenges that are contributing to the industrial market’s high energy usage including transportation costs, Scope 3 emissions, and coincident peaks.

KEY QUOTES FROM Jason Massey:

“The reality is, we often find a triangulation it ends up being two to three KPIs that you’re watching the relationship to. In the cold chain COP, coefficient of performance, is a really important KPI. We would tell you that that’s necessary but not sufficient. And that you need other data in there such as production — the blast freezing, the products going in and out — to understand the relationship between production, the work that’s being done and that thermal energy that’s going in that out of that facility. So COP is really important for cold chain but then you want to offset that and look at other other types of KPIs that are that are you know tangential making as much profit at the cost of the planet’s health.” 

“I think sometimes people are looking for a silver bullet with that technology [AI] to solve problems. So we want to be careful not to overhype that but give it it’s its proper use. It’s just another tool in the toolbox to do things. And then I think the other challenge often times is it’s easy to get the first 20%, it’s really hard to get the next 5, 10 and even the next 20% of energy efficiency or energy intensity reductions. So it’s it’s really, really important to to do the measurement verification to help the decision makers prove that these things are actually working and that they’ll invest more and more money into those projects. So we’ve seen kind of a cheat that you’ll see in the marketplace — we do believe there is a place for carbon credits in the marketplace. But a lot of times people just rush to purchase carbon credits to try to accelerate their path to Net Zero. In reality you need to do the harder things do the things inside of your facility work on the transportation side of the equation.”

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Brielle Jaekel

Experienced journalist with roles including lead, deputy editor, managing editor, associate editor, staff reporter, staff writer, and editorial assistant.