Fuel Cell Energy: ESG Advancements in Industrial Manufacturing with ‘Should Carbon’ and aPriori

Leah Archibald: Fuel cells are basically what everyone is talking about right now in this moment of energy transition that we’re going through. What is the role of your company in supplying this green revolution?  

Ben Aldrich: Sure. In addition to providing clean electricity to a lot of our customers, we can also either help capture or recover CO2 or we can generate hydrogen as well. 

Leah Archibald: Not a lot of people are talking about Should Carbon, a lot of manufacturers know what Should Cost is, which is using aPriori’s digital models to get a real accurate sense of what design Should Cost, but Should Carbon is a new area. Could you explain how you’d define it. 

Ben Aldrich: Sure, so for us, we actually just started the ESG team to start looking at our carbon footprint of our products. As more and more of our customers are concerned about that, it’s a good thing to know. The other cool thing was, is we have just started aPriori. We are about six months or so into using it, and the carbon calculator part of it, the Should Carbon part of it, was really beneficial because I’m starting to get asked questions about how much weight of steel is in here, how much carbon is in this product that we’re building. So having a tool like aPriori to be able to calculate a very accurate number will be really useful for us. 

Leah Archibald: And there’s a lot that goes into Should Carbon that people don’t think of. So in the past when companies have needed to calculate their carbon to match reporting regulations, they’ve really had only one piece of data to go on, maybe two. One being about weight of the product and the materials used, and two, maybe they would give a value for the electricity. 

Ben Aldrich: As we get asked more and more detailed questions about the carbon, I think using the tool and having all of those aspects available to us to adjust both where we get the material from and where we get the parts from, and being able to look at and adjust those and make decisions based on the information that we’re getting out of aPriori will be really helpful for us. The fact that we’re starting to take this, we’re a green company or energy conscious company, carbon conscious company, and we’re actually looking at ourselves now and starting to say, are we really? And that’s really important today.