Ahead of Climate Week NYC, Barbara Humpton, CEO of Siemens USA, shared her thoughts on how technology offers us not only a way to scale sustainable impact but deliver more productive and resilient outcomes as well. In her role at Siemens, Humpton leads a team of 45,000 in every state and Puerto Rico to support the industry and infrastructure at the backbone of the U.S. economy. She’ll be at the Nest Climate Campus with Marsia Geldert-Murphey, president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, to discuss the future of the power grid on September 25.
In 2015, Siemens became the first major industrial company to commit to being carbon-neutral by 2030. It is a member of Climate Group’s RE100, EV100, and EP100 initiatives.
It’s been almost 10 years since Siemens made its pledge for carbon-neutrality, and the company has since upped that to net zero. What’s changed over the past decade?
You know, our pledge in 2015 is actually one of many steps the company has taken toward environmental protection over the past 50 years. But what makes this moment different, I think, is a real consensus around multiplying impact. We’re seeing that as others make net-zero commitments. And as government policies focus on accelerating progress.
Most importantly, though, climate technologies have become much more effective. So our focus is on applying these technologies faster. At Siemens, in everything we do, we’re trying to increase the speed and scale for applying technologies that will achieve decarbonization.
As for our own journey, Siemens cut its emissions in half by 2020 and then set even bolder goals for accelerating our reductions. This confidence stems from our belief in the power of our own technologies. More than 90 percent of our portfolio enables our customers to achieve a positive sustainability impact.
Siemens is focused on connecting the real and the digital worlds. Share with us what that means and how it can accelerate a company or community’s sustainability goals.
Let me first share this statistic: 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact is addressable in the design stage. Now imagine we could design the product better, more sustainably. That’s what today’s digital tools allow us to do – we can work on real-world designs and processes in the digital world before we try them in the real world.
Now think about how that capability broadens our efforts to become net zero. We can look at every product, every building, every process, and ask ourselves: How can we do this more sustainably?
That’s our message to our customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, we have the most powerful tool for addressing any challenge, including climate change. We can optimize everything. And not only can we become more sustainable, we can become more productive and resilient. We can produce stronger business results.
You describe yourself as an optimist. What keeps you optimistic when the challenge ahead is steep, like what our power grid is facing as demand for clean energy skyrockets?
There’s often this idea that optimism is about putting on rose-colored glasses. I don’t think so. I think optimism is about clearly seeing a problem, identifying a path forward and then being confident in our ability to find solutions.
Right now, we’re hearing a lot about the power grid facing its greatest test yet. As manufacturing comes online, as AI data centers grow, the demand for power will be immense. And we’ll want that power to be clean to meet our decarbonization goals.
But here’s why I’m optimistic: We have the technologies to re-engineer the grid so that it’s even stronger. And it’s already happening at the grid edge. This is where power meets the end user. Think microgrids, or EV chargers. The technologies we are bringing in here are laying the foundation to rapidly scale clean and resilient electricity across the entire grid. Watch this space.
What’s your advice to companies just starting out on their net zero journeys?
It’s okay to not have all the answers. No company does, not even one as large as Siemens. We continue to face tough questions about decarbonization. But we also continue to find answers by working together and being part of an ecosystem of partners with shared challenges.
The power of ecosystems is why we launched our Siemens Xcelerator platform a couple of years ago. The idea was that an open digital business platform could connect companies of all sizes to the tools and partners they need to accelerate not just their digital transformation journeys but their sustainability ones.
Finally, we’re in a time of action. There’s no time to waste. And as we’ve seen with our customers and through our own experience, the journey to net zero does not require choosing sustainability over something else. We can do more with less.