Overcoming challenges and accelerating clean energy development
As investment in sustainable power climbs, transmission and distribution networks risk becoming a hindrance in the race to net zero. Grid organisations must quickly grapple with capacity challenges to expand and upgrade our infrastructure for the crucial decade to come.
Global demand for electricity is booming. Growing use at home, such as for electric vehicles and the heating and cooling of our houses, is combining with huge requirements in our professional lives – from digital ways of working to the fuelling of major industry and new power-hungry data centres supporting the development and use of AI. This alone is creating pressure on our ageing grids. When coupled with the decarbonisation agenda, the task becomes almost Herculean.
According to the International Energy Agency, over 80m km of grid needs to be added or refurbished by 2040 to meet the electricity demand required to stay within the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets. That is the equivalent of the existing network worldwide.
This is not just a grid capacity challenge either. New grids need to be more flexible and agile than their predecessors. The intermittent nature of renewable sources means networks must be capable of balancing and storing energy to ensure a consistent and efficient power supply.
The major programmes required to deliver this changing energy mix and burgeoning electricity demand are incredibly complex, spanning huge distances and competing for resource from constrained supply chains.
While global markets face differing regulatory landscapes and environmental and funding challenges to delivery, there are some commonalities. This is particularly true when it comes to industry capacity, with significant bottlenecks – from specialist parts to technical skills – stalling development of these more expansive, complex grids.
In this context, there are three priorities operators and developers, regardless of geography, must consider as they are building, renovating and maintaining grids for the future:
Embedding the Programme Management Office (PMO) from an early stage
The first is to decide how the PMO responsible for delivering the programme will run itself. This needs to happen at the earliest development phase. Considerations include in-house capability – and therefore what type of outsourced resource is needed – and what skills are required at each stage of the programme. Building the PMO around these requirements sets the enterprise up for success.
The PMO can then provide the critical local and global market intelligence to plan around complexities and crunch points, bringing lessons from the wider sector – from offshore wind and nuclear to oil and gas – and beyond. It enables the building of closer relationships with a sprawling supply chain, understanding suppliers’ maturity and capacity, and providing clients with the best possible bargaining positions.
In markets with the highest demand and rate of development, the temptation can be to rush to delivery as quickly as possible to expedite expanding project pipelines. In reality, the busier the regional pipeline, the larger the need for the type of capital delivery integrated framework which a PMO will establish and enable. Apparent shortcuts in the early stages will ultimately come through in delays and costs later.
As grid organisations face pressure to deliver huge programmes, and also to drive value for money for investors and keep consumer prices low, the PMO plays a vital role in keeping timelines and costs in check.
Creating a realistic, bespoke digital strategy
The complexity and scale of these programmes make digital strategy a necessity. Within the PMO, digital tools underpin modern project controls. They enable integrated cost and programme benchmarking and monitoring, including advanced performance metrics which provide historical and predictive reporting, to support informed decision making and better project management.
The benefits of a digital strategy go beyond design and delivery into operation too. From drones that improve the safety and efficiency of working at height, to grid enhancing technology and the use of AI to automate and proactively manage capacity, we must lean on the tools at our disposal to reduce costs and risk.
However, technological capabilities vary across regions and organisations. The first step in grasping the full potential of technology should be a digital maturity assessment. From there, we can create bespoke and realistic roadmaps towards becoming a high-performing digital enterprise, based on wider business objectives and where digital tools can have the most impact.
This matters for both efficiency and security. Gradually building digital capabilities at a pace suitable for the organisation’s people and processes will ensure employees are bought in and trained to make best use of systems and data, securely. It will mean new tools or platforms can be implemented as quickly as possible without opening up security risks.
As the sector that provides the backbone of critical infrastructure, cyber security must be our watchword. The rate of advancement is dizzying both from those working to protect critical infrastructure and from those seeking to undermine it. As bad actors become increasingly sophisticated, governments and businesses are racing to keep pace. In the US, for example, the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is funnelling US$2bn in funding for cybersecurity resilience and innovation – US$30m specifically for tools to protect clean energy infrastructure.
An organisation that understands its own capabilities and promotes a digital-first culture will be better placed to adopt new systems quickly, integrating them smoothly into current infrastructure, and shoring up their defences.
Getting the right people in the right place
From tools to people, the technical experience and understanding needed on these complex programmes are in short supply with fierce competition for resources globally.
Attracting, training and investing in new, local talent will be crucial for markets to build long-term capacity and resilience. Governments are getting behind the need to develop local skills for the future – and to work in collaboration with the private sector to do so.
In the UK, Sir Keir Starmer has recently launched Skills England, a body aimed at working with central and local government, as well as businesses and unions, to set out a national strategy and funding mechanism to build the skills we need for the future, while reducing reliance on overseas labour.
Transmission and distribution must play a crucial part in this to protect the country’s energy security and decarbonisation goals.
However, building new skills will take time – a luxury which governments cannot afford in their efforts to mitigate the impacts of geopolitical tensions on energy provision and to keep global temperatures from exceeding the 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
In the immediate term, we need to think laterally about skills. To keep the current pipeline on track, we have to consider the expertise that already exists in adjacent, asset-intensive markets such as water or oil and gas. People in these areas already have the soft skills needed for the work in our sector, as well as the knowledge and technical aptitude that makes them easier to retrain and redeploy in transmission and distribution.
Understanding shared challenges across regions is essential. There are common issues and solutions around setting up for success, particularly on the development of skills and digital tools. It is important we lean on these global experiences and lessons while applying them through the lens of regional and national contexts.
The sector faces an enormous task. To unpick the challenges and avoid the potential gridlock, we must look up and out, learning from other sectors’ successes and failures, redeploying talent and setting ourselves up to implement the best technology in the construction and management of green energy grids.