Environmental legislation, the need for energy efficiency, and safety requirements are currently the main drivers for customers’ actions towards developing their businesses in a more sustainable way.
Wärtsilä Services strives to be a leader in supporting its customers’ efforts to meet and exceed current and future business and sustainability demands. This is the essence of Wärtsilä Services’ role as regards sustainability: we continuously develop the offering in order to provide customers with solutions that will enable them to run their businesses and grow in the most sustainable way.
Furthermore, Wärtsilä conducts its business in a responsible way, including providing services from locations in close proximity to the customers’ installations, and by investing and offering employment opportunities in local communities.
Energy efficiency and emissions
The increasing availability of alternative liquid fuels and gas, together with stricter environmental and safety requirements, creates opportunities for the Services business to improve the operational efficiency of customer installations, while at the same time reducing their environmental impact. Wärtsilä develops and provides services, such as upgrades, reconditioning projects, fuel conversions, and retrofit solutions that improve both fuel efficiency and environmental performance. This enables compliance with stringent environmental legislation while extending the operational lifetime of the application.
For existing installations, a set of primary upgrading solutions are available, including:
- Engine, propulsion, or electrical & automation system efficiency upgrade packages that reduce fuel and/or lube-oil consumption, thereby contributing to lower emissions and the generation of economic benefits
- Low NOx solutions that combine various engine modifications designed to find the ideal combination of compression ratio, injection timing, and injection rate. The concept has been developed so as to achieve the best possible trade-off between NOx reduction and fuel consumption.
- The conversion of propeller shaft sealing systems to an anti-pollution version that eliminates the risk of water pollution
- Diesel to gas conversions that considerably reduce emissions from the installation. The conversion of heavy fuel oil or marine diesel oil installations to operate on natural gas offers extended benefits.
For new and existing installations, secondary methods are available to integrate additional equipment that contribute towards emissions abatement. Wärtsilä Services provides unparalleled environmental solutions, as well as the field experts needed for their installation and commissioning.
Optimising the sustainability of customer operations
Wärtsilä’s offering goes beyond retrofits, upgrades, conversions, and field services expertise. The lifecycle support approach using long term service agreements, allows Wärtsilä to offer customers guarantees for reduced fuel consumption, and hence have a direct impact in reducing emissions. Furthermore, the recently launched Wärtsilä Genius optimisation services enable increased competitiveness and effectiveness in daily operations with real-time efficiency and emissions abatement improvements:
- Engine efficiency monitoring: the bridge/dashboard monitor indicates specific fuel oil consumption to create awareness of fuel usage, and to enable a vessel’s crew to make the necessary operational adjustments to optimise the consumption. Measuring fuel consumption online, visualising it, and comparing it to other performance data over time is the first step towards ship energy efficiency monitoring plan services.
- Trim optimisation: provides an indication to the bridge / dashboard of the optimal vessel trim. Real-time optimisation of the ship’s trim provides 2-5% fuel savings, thereby contributing to lower levels of emissions.
- Hull and propeller cleaning interval optimisation: calculates the optimal cleaning dates for the hull and propeller. This results in avoiding fuel consumption increases of up to 30% caused by surface roughness, and hence enables emissions optimisation.