Digital Thread and Barcodes for the Clean Energy Transition
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act will pour billions of dollars into upgrading and expanding the electric grid to support the clean energy transition. Some of this funding will also be directed towards programs that increase the resiliency and security of the grid as described in DOE’s America’s Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition.
Energy companies are rising to the clean energy challenge, but are simultaneously facing new challenges including supply chain and labor shortages, cyber security threats, and severe weather events. Part of the solution to these challenges is high quality datasets to support automation, analysis, and risk mitigation. Creating and maintaining high quality datasets from manufacturing through decommissioning provides a Digital Thread and allows stakeholders along the supply chain to add and access traceability information.
An enabling technology for the Digital Thread is smart barcodes which link physical assets with their digital datasets. In order for this technology to gain wide scale adoption, it must be based on industry standards that allow manufacturers, distributors, and asset owners to access and share data in a consistent manner.
Other industries such as pharmaceuticals, healthcare, food, and railroad have implemented industry standards allowing manufacturers to apply barcodes that contain a unique ID, product attributes, and links to supporting datasets including supply chain, testing, and certification.
To bring this technology to the energy industry, Locusview is leading several programs to create industry standards for supply chain and asset traceability.