Rolls-Royce Debuts Cloud-based Energy Management Module
Rolls-Royce has unveiled a ‘cloud-based’ fuel consumption and carbon dioxide monitoring module designed to help ship owners meet the European Union’s Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) regulation.
Starting January 1, 2018, collection and reporting of voyage data will become a mandatory, as owners of vessels over 5,000 gross metric tons that call at European Union ports will be required to monitor, report and verify their fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
China, too, has similar reporting mechanisms in place, with the International Maritime Organization’s data collection requirements entering into force in January 2019. This requires the collection of fuel consumption data per fuel type, but not CO2 emissions directly.
“The Energy Management EU-MRV module allows for automated gathering and reporting of fuel consumption, CO2 emissions and other relevant data required of the new regulation,” said Bjørn Kåre Myskja, Rolls-Royce, UX/Developer Engineer, Digital & Systems.
With the new module installed as an add-on solution to the Rolls-Royce Energy Management System launched in May, data can be sent automatically from the ship to the cloud, where information and reports can be accessed and downloaded from anywhere with an internet connection. The software also validates incoming data.
“With ship owners able to constantly track accurate fuel consumption and emissions data via the Rolls-Royce Energy Management web portal, they can reduce fuel costs and mitigate against incompliance and any financial penalties imposed by member states. More accurate data delivers greater costs savings,” Myskja said.
In addition to data collection simplicity, a key focus during the software development phase was data protection. Eivind Vinje, Rolls-Royce, Technical Product Manager – Energy Management, said, “System security and integrity has been increased four-fold, with state-of-the-art encryption technologies, a two-step verification process and a 24/7 security centre. We also invited a number of third party cyber security experts to ‘hack’ into the system, but all failed to breach the protocols or find any weak spots.”
The software has been verified by the Norway-accredited MRV verifier Ecoxy AS, which also cooperated in the development of the solution to ensure its compliance with all aspects of the EU MRV regulation as well as to meet customer requirements for a solution capable of substantially reducing manual data inputs.
Since its market introduction earlier this year, the Rolls-Royce Energy Management System has received its first commercial success with a contract for two Nor Lines vessels.