When considering tools to help future-proof infrastructure, it’s hard to overemphasize the value of digital twins. These technological tools enable faster sustainable transition, accelerating project delivery of “green capex” projects (linked to Net Zero and climate adaptation), unlocking efficiencies in both new and existing infrastructure assets, and promoting circularity by extending the lifecycles of diverse assets.

Here's a look at seven important ways digital twins can help your organization make more sustainable choices throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.

While this is by no means a comprehensive list, it offers a glimpse of digital twins’ capabilities for helping to create green, sustainable infrastructure that tackles the challenges of climate change and supports healthy, growing communities.

1. Optimising Embodied Carbon

From the early design stages, infrastructure designers should be empowered to prioritize sustainability and reduce environmental footprint. Embodied carbon in construction and material transportation is an important focus area, not only because it can no longer be avoided or reduced once the infrastructure is built, but also because many of the products and materials involved (steel or cement, for example) are highly carbon intensive and difficult to replace.

Digital twins can integrate automated workflows with carbon calculation tools to seamlessly generate carbon reports and visualize those calculations within 3D digital models, supporting design optimisation based on carbon intensity. Ideally, and to facilitate carbon transparency across the supply chain, the infrastructure digital models created in the design stage shouldn't be required in any specific proprietary format; rather, they should be consumed by a vendor-agnostic digital twin platform, independent of the origin or vendor.

2. Designing Environmentally Resilient Infrastructure

Climate change requires a greater degree of infrastructural resilience to extreme weather patterns. Structural finite element analysis and design application can support the environmentally resilient design of buildings, bridges, tunnels, towers, and industrial facilities.  One asset for which this is particularly crucial are offshore wind farms, which must be weather-proof against extreme wind speed and turbulence to reduce the risk of turbine damage and downtime.

Structural software solutions can help design offshore wind power infrastructure (such as turbines and their foundations) that is more robust against high winds and extreme loads, as well as develop advanced control strategies to mitigate the effects of extreme weather events (e.g., blade pitch, yaw, and load controls). These solutions can also simulate the response of wind turbines to extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

3. Hyperscaling New Sources of Clean Energy Production

With three-quarters of the global GHG emissions associated with the energy sector, diversifying energy production from renewable sources is critical to successfully achieving net zero milestones and diminishing our reliance on specific technologies and resources.  As a result, we can curb the environmental vulnerabilities of overdependence on a single renewable energy solution.

As technology advances and economies of scale are realized, the role of green hydrogen in the energy transition is expected to grow  due to its potential to decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors (e.g., heavy industry), store renewable energy, and enhance grid stability.

Pipeline design, analysis, and optimisation tools are essential for developing green hydrogen plants. These tools help model stress and strain in hydrogen pipes, design corrosion-resistant pipelines, analyze thermal expansion, and optimise for cost-effectiveness. They ensure safe, reliable, and economical hydrogen pipelines for underground storage, transportation to refueling stations, and injection into natural gas pipelines. Additionally, they enable the creation of detailed design documentation, 3D models, and fatigue analysis.

4. Planning and Managing Sustainable Cities  

City planners may want to aggregate diverse data types for any number of reasons: more immersive visualization, better stakeholder communication, increased holistic management, and better support for sustainability and resilient outcomes. Cloud-based geospatial visualization solutions can support this through what is usually called a "single pane of glass."

It all starts with a digital surface model. With photogrammetry tools, we can generate 3D reality mesh and digital surface models computed from previously collected remote images, positioning data, or point clouds obtained from drones, cars, or satellite sensors. We can then use those data layers for different purposes such as contextual information (e.g., background tiles) for visualizing other layers, as input data for other models, or for AI-driven feature extraction for object detection and recognition (e.g., computer vision).

This technology has a range of applications, including:

• Computing and/or visualizing 3D visual scenarios for city-scale flood risks
• Promoting sustainable practices across the city regarding energy needs for buildings and facilities
• Modeling urban heat and sidewalk / road safety simulations
• Assessing individual trees’ health conditions to predict maintenance needs and repair

5. Monitoring Critical Infrastructure Assets

As climate mitigation increases our need for more critical infrastructure related to clean energy production and flood control, such as hydropower dams, the higher climate risks bring us more focus on monitoring those assets. Fortunately, we can leverage IoT and AI to build advanced monitoring and inspection systems.

High-fidelity reality mesh models from dams (based on drone surveys, for instance) can be leveraged for remote, virtual inspections. For instance, a technician in Australia can inspect a dam in the U.S. Computer vision and AI can also improve inspections for automatic crack detection. IoT sensors can then be implemented to build early warning systems that automatically trigger alarms when a ground deformation is identified, or an environmental anomaly (such as stage level rise) is detected. All this can be accomplished with digital dam monitoring solutions.

6. Managing Water Distribution Systems

Data-driven solutions for smart management of water distribution bring several benefits in terms of improved environmental performance. One example: energy efficient pump optimization.

Energy costs often comprise 25-30% of a utility's total operation and maintenance costs, while pump energy specifically can make up as much as 50% of a water utility's electricity consumption. However, by leveraging digital twins, operators can import pump performance data while managing their water supply network and compare operational data with pump curves to assess how well the operating point matches the best efficiency point (BEP). They can also compare pump operations over historical periods by pulling pump data from different times to see if performance changes.

In addition, these solutions can help reduce non-revenue water (or NRW), water that has been produced and is "lost" before it reaches the customer. NRW has a significant economic impact – recent data estimates that global annual NRW is 126 billion cubic meters, translating to roughly $40 billion USD in annual losses. Digital twins can help monitor flows and pressures, identify anomalous events, understand water losses, and prioritize areas for replacement that need it most.  The result is a significant reduction of NRW by 20% or more.

7. Mapping, Detecting and Managing Groundwater

Water availability is a major societal challenge, becoming more critical with climate change. Groundwater, stored in aquifers from surface water infiltration, is vital, providing up to 100% freshwater in some regions and is crucial for irrigation and the food industry.

We can better manage and sustain this precious natural resource by using 3D geological modeling software with geoscience data management platforms. For instance, we can identify potential tools to collect, process, and interpret subsurface data, enabling 3D modeling of groundwater bodies. We can do resource assessments, as they estimate groundwater yield, track aquifer sustainability, and analyze water quality parameters like seawater intrusion. We can also perform better management planning, as these software solutions optimize groundwater use, ensure sustainability, and help implement strategies to protect resources from pollution and depletion.

A Dynamic Solution

Digital twins are rapidly transforming the ways we design, build, and operate infrastructure. This transformative technology offers a powerful tool to accelerate the transition toward a sustainable future, enabling data-driven decision-making throughout the infrastructure lifecycle.

From optimizing green hydrogen plants to managing critical water resources, the applications of digital twins in sustainable infrastructure development are vast and ever evolving. By embracing this technology, we unlock the potential to build a future where infrastructure is not just functional, but environmentally responsible, resilient, and contributing to a thriving planet.

The author, Rodrigo Fernandes, is director of ES(D)G at Bentley Systems.