Bentley’s open-access digital twin integrates carbon calculator

Bentley Systems, Incorporated, an infrastructure engineering software company, announced at COP27 expanded workflows for embodied carbon calculation in the Bentley iTwin platform, which powers their open-access digital twin infrastructure solutions.

The new integration enables carbon assessment in infrastructure digital twin solutions, powered by the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3).

Developed by the nonprofit Building Transparency, EC3 is a free and open-access tool that allows benchmarking, assessment and reductions in embodied carbon, focused on the upfront supply chain emissions of construction materials.

The Bentley iTwin platform is an open, scalable, platform-as-a-service offering that enables developers to create and bring to market solutions that solve real infrastructure problems by leveraging digital twins.

The EC3 integration allows Bentley’s infrastructure digital twin solutions and third-party applications built on the Bentley iTwin platform, to simplify and accelerate the generation of carbon reporting and insights based on the no-cost, open-source EC3 carbon database and calculator.

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According to Bentley, the integration creates time savings with improved accuracy and provides uncertainty estimations of EPD (Environmental Product Declaration) data and increases carbon transparency due to its open-source/open-access strategy.

Users can incorporate engineering data created by various design tools into a single view using the Bentley iTwin platform, generate a unified report of materials and quantities and share it with different carbon analysis tools – now also with EC3 – via cloud synchronisation.

Stacy Smedley, executive director of Building Transparency, said: “It is great that the integration is built upon an open-source framework – foundational for both EC3 and the iTwin platform. We see this integrated workflow as a significant opportunity for…digital integrators to link carbon analysis to infrastructure digital twins while ensuring complete control of their data, applications and IP.”

Kaustubh Page, director of product management, iTwin platform for Bentley Systems, added: “We see the EC3 integration as a critical feature for the Bentley iTwin platform, further driving us toward the sustainability vision for the platform.

Katie Ross, global sustainability lead for real estate and facilities at Microsoft, said: “Microsoft was the first large corporate user of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator and is piloting the tool on its 17-building redevelopment project at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, targeting an embodied carbon reduction of 30%.

“Seeing the EC3 tool and the Bentley iTwin platform converging is a great example of how we aim to accelerate sustainability through collaboration and demonstrates the power of data democratisation.”