A vessel performance and voyage planning company spun out of Clipper Group says claims of emission reductions from software vendors can be meaningless without a common baseline of data from actual ships.
Coach Solutions, which is now part of Kongsberg Digital, said vessel operators do not need vast amounts of data from software, just better validation of key information from their own ships.
Chief executive Anders Bruun told TradeWinds that coming from a bulk shipping group meant Coach had a verified set of ship operating data going back to 2011, which competitors might struggle to match.
But Coach believes it is a myth that collecting thousands of vessel data points is an advantage to optimisation. It believes it is more important that the correct information is used.
More than 2,000 vessels are using Coach to report standard data using just one piece of software. The company then validates the daily vessel reports using ship-specific values and previously reported data. Under a recent agreement, information is also verified by DNV.
Bruun said: “You have to be careful how you benchmark. It depends on what you are comparing to, and you can’t compare weather routing with anything.
“I can create a route which creates 15 times more emissions and compare it with something optimal. There are infinite routes and weather.”
Bruun said that with regulations such as the Carbon Intensity Indicator coming into play, operators need to find a balance between going greener and being profitable.
Coach’s process relies on in-house naval architects constructing digital twins for each client vessel, plugging ship-specific fuel consumption and emissions performance into a platform that can then report on how ships are performing against actual benchmark values.
“If I need to have a CII rating of ‘B’ it can make it [the ship] as profitable as possible but stay within the rating,” Bruun said.
Coach is gearing up to provide help with the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) when it applies to shipping from 2024.
“When an operator is looking at a voyage, we [can] help them take the sustainable choice — how is the best way we can go into the EU, what speed should we go at, and should we take the cargo.”
It will also be able to report statements for carbon emissions within the ETS framework.
In the future, Coach will add information on efficiency systems such as where the wind is coming from and input from wind-assisted propulsion.
Coach needed to move out of Clipper in 2020 because some operators did not want to give their data to a perceived competitor, Bruun said of the move to become part of Kongsberg’s Vessel Insight set-up.
“Kongsberg have many applications on vessels, but they lacked the ability to get on board any vessel,” he said. “They had the sensors [on ships] and could collect all the sensor data, and we had the manually reported data. Now we have the best of both worlds and can combine those two.”
