Hackathon’s four projects to decarbonise Renault Group plants

Four projects have been selected from a three-day hackathon at Renault Group’s Flins Refactory involving about 100 contestants in 13 teams representing more than 30 companies, start-ups and including students.

The winner was the “Kairos” project – developing a digital platform to optimise the start-up and shutdown periods of paint drying ovens, generating additional electricity for the Douai plant worth an estimated 230,000 euros annually with the project possibly rolled out to other facilities.

The “CO₂ Advisor” project was second, creating a tool to measure CO₂ emissions from production activities in real time to give operators greater visibility of energy consumption in their workshops.

A joint third prize went to the “Adjust’Air” project – developing a technical solution to optimise ventilation and air filtration systems at production facilities to enable a threefold decrease of energy consumption from air extraction, and the “Sieren” project – implementing a dashboard to model and monitor plants’ electricity consumption and incorporate meteorological parameters and energy consumption in plant schedules.

The hackathon challenge provided ideas for Renault Group to accelerate the shift to carbon neutrality at all its industrial sites with the four projects possibly deployed at plants as early as 2022.

Based on the group’s Renaulution transformation, Hackathon CO₂ Industry participants, organised in partnership with Google Cloud and with the assistance of open innovation specialist Startup Inside, considered five themes – cutting energy consumption at industrial facilities, enhancing buildings’ thermal performance, increasing low carbon heat production, accelerating the digital transformation to boost energy performance, and imagining new and more sustainable industrial models.

About 150 people watched the hackathon on site and several hundred more tuned in online. The Alpine F1 Team sustainable development team was also part of the jury when it gave out additional prizes in the name of the brand – the audience award and a special prize for the most innovative project.

Renault Group presented its new environmental strategy this year, aimed at reaching carbon neutrality at its plants in Europe and halving the CO₂ emissions of its plants worldwide by 2030.