Our partnerships innovate the energy transition

In the past, we often stayed on the cutting edge by creating everything on our own. But today, the development of partner ecosystem with companies that share our values and goals allows for innovative and dynamic collaborations that benefit the energy transition.

Our Siemens Energy Ventures team works with a variety of young companies, bringing their expertise, ideas and new technology into our organization and scaling them up for impact.

Forming partnerships like these allows us to speed up the process of creating innovative technologies that make the energy business more sustainable and help mitigate climate change. For example, partnering with the autonomous robotics company ANYbotics left our engineers free to focus on the development of a digital brain that allows robots to move through power plants all by themselves.

If we had developed the robots ourselves as well, the project would have taken us much longer. The collaboration let us make autonomous power plant robots market-ready much faster. Using robots with a digital brain and easy online accessibility, means that power plants no longer need to be shut down during maintenance and health and safety risks for employees are drastically minimized. This is what we are developing in our Focus Field of Action – Condition Based Service Intervention under the leadership of Jaydeep Naha, who is also a partner in the Siemens Energy Ventures.

Of course, the innovation we’re doing isn’t only about “robotics”. It’s about creating the asset management of the future, where robots, drones and AI enhance the lifespan of energy assets – strengthening them with predictive maintenance, reducing downtime, hazards and wastage, and limiting leakage with early and systematic detection. And we do all this with an emphasis on a circular economy, reusing materials to the maximum extent possible. 

These kinds of innovation have a direct impact on sustainability. Our ground robots are equipped with environmental sensors that can assess air and water quality, monitor emissions, detect pollutants and help utilities track their environmental impact so that they can better protect our ecosystems.

Robotics is just one example of how partnerships and innovation are making the energy business more sustainable on the ground. But we’re in the air too. We’ve partnered with a manufacturer of unmanned drones that can carry out system inspections on transmission lines using our multi-sensor system SIEAERO. The drones replace piloted helicopter inspections and allow us to capture in a single flight inspection data that can be later analyzed with AI to identify changes or damages since the last inspection.

“When we talk about sustainability at Siemens Energy,” says Jaydeep Naha, General Manager of Digital Solutions and Project Execution at Siemens Energy, “it’s not just a word. It’s a value and a direction – and the work we do here moves the needle day by day.” 

Combined picture and video credits: Bali Abhishek and Siemens Energy