SK E&C President Ahn Jae-hyun talks with Veea CEO Allen Salmasi over a teleconference as SK E&C strikes an MOU with U.S. edge computing company Veea to jointly develop and operate a construction safety management system for mobile devices, dubbed “SmartSafety Platform,: on Oct. 21. (Photos: SK E&C)

SK E&C has signed an MOU with U.S. edge computing company Veea to jointly develop and operate a construction safety management system for mobile devices, dubbed “SmartSafety Platform.”

SmartSafety Platform will be an integrated construction safety management system designed to provide danger information, collected and analyzed from industrial disaster big data, to field workers and managers via mobile devices in real time.

A ceremony to sign the MOU between SK E&C and Veea was not held due to the effects of Covid-19, but the deal was struck over a teleconference meeting between SK E&C President Ahn Jae-hyun and Veea CEO Allen Salmasi, the Korean contractor said on Oct. 21.

Allen Salmasi has maintained good relationships with Korean companies. As Salmasi served as president in charge of mobile telecom business with Qualcomm, he had played a leading role in developing and introducing the CDMA technology and supplied telecom systems based on the technology to Korea in cooperation with ETRI in the 1990s.

In 2014, he established telecom equipment and platform developer Veea to supply platform application programs and a network environment for their operation.

In particular, Veea’s edge computing platform technology is a decentralized data processing system designed to make up for shortcomings of centralized cloud data processing server. Edge computing is emerging as one of the essential technologies of the 4th Industrial Revolution such as self-driving, smart factory and virtual reality.

Special environments such as constriction sites and underground space are not easy places to facilitate access to the Internet, and safety information data cannot be made available in real time since wired internet network cannot be installed until construction work is done to some extent.

Through the deal, SK E&C is expected to realize a network system capable of supplying safety information even to specialized construction sites in a seamless fashion.

After accumulating experiences and expertise with the platform service business, SK E&C said it will apply the smart safety platform to overseas projects the Korean contractor will implement.

“Through the agreement with the global communication platform company Veea, a global communication platform firm, SK E&C expects a distinguished platform service which can significantly improve the safety of construction sites,” President Ahn said. “SK E&C will continue developing useful platform services to improve construction safety and create social value.”

Dignitaries, including SK E&C President Ahn Jae-hyun and Deputy Minister Kang Kyung-sung of the Industry Policy Office at the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, push the button in a ceremony to celebrate the dedication of Bloom SK Fuel Cell’s plant in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do, specializing in the production of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) on Oct. 20.

SK E&C Localizes Production of Solid Oxide Fuel Cell

SK E&C held a ceremony to dedicate Bloom SK Fuel Cell’s plant in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do, to produce solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) on Oct. 20.

Bloom SK Fuel Cell was set up as a 51:49 joint venture between U.S. Bloom Energy and SK E&C in January to produce solid oxide fuel cells.

SK E&C has accelerated efforts to localize SOFC under a vision of leading a global decentralized power grid market. The contractor set a first step to launch the fuel cell business as SK E&C obtained the right to exclusively supply SOFC to Korea with Bloom Energy, and the two companies have made efforts to explore new business opportunities through strategic partnership.

SK E&C and Bloom Energy singed a joint venture agreement in September 2019. Bloom SK Fuel Cell completed installment of production equipment at the Gumi plant in July before test-operating it for pilot production.

The plant is expected to produce 50 megawatts of fuel cells in 2021, with a plan to expand the capacity to 400 megawatts in 2027. SOFC will be supplied to fuel cell power plants next January as early as possible.

Along with producing fuel cells, SK E&C signed an engineering, procurement and construction contract with U.S. data center operator Equinix, to build a 6.4-megawatt fuel cell system powering a data center owned by Equinix in California.