“What has been your greatest achievement over the last couple of years?” someone asked me at the end of a presentation I gave to a group of investors a few months ago. Half-jokingly, I replied, “All the things we resisted doing and stopped doing.”
As Paul Martin aptly put it in one of his posts on the notion of “trying everything” in the fight against climate change:
“We need to triage our limited resources, money, and political goodwill and emotional bandwidth, applying them only to things that have passed a series of stage-gates of techno-economic evaluation.”
On a more heartfelt note, what I am most proud of is ZEPA - The Zero Emission Port Alliance, an effort to bring together stakeholders across our industry’s value chain to make battery-electric container handling equipment the standard this decade, through de-bottlenecking, optimizing, and accelerating adoption thereby eliminating the “green premium”.
Last week, we held ZEPA’s 3rd steering committee meeting with delegates from members including CATL, SANY, Rocsys, Kempower, SSA Marine, Port of Rotterdam and Patrick Terminals. A lot of great work has been done in a short period of time and we will be soon releasing ZEPA's first industry report.
When I took this job three years ago, I didn’t realize it would take a coalition of this sort to achieve our goals. But one thing I have learned is that regardless of the sector, be it hard or "easy to abate", the required change is truly systemic. For us, technology is not even the toughest part. Vested interests and inertia against change are entrenched in existing processes, operating models, responsibilities, etc. all of which contribute to the green premium. Sometimes, it takes the combined power of a broad coaltion to overcome these obstacles.
Photo credit to the talented Sissel Christine Søe Böss from TOC Europe and ZEPA’s 2nd Steerco in Rotterdam, June 2024
Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2025 Cork Chamber Company of the Year Awards! 🎉 A well-deserved recognition for your dedication to sustainability and making a positive impact in Cork and beyond. Best of luck! 👏