Monthly Archives: January 2023

Raising the Energy levels for the Energy Transition

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https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2023

In the past week the Davos World Economic Forum has been on, where thousands gather to listen, explore, make contact and generally gather the mood of the Worlds economic climate over the coming year. The sessions are highly valuable to be selective over but listen into.

Over this weekend, I spent a fair amount of reading time working through the World Economic Forum to remind me of this incredible source of knowledge across many world issues and challenges. I think this is not an event to miss when you cut through all the negatives surrounding Davos and the “elite” and lucky ones are able to rub shoulders and get a better understanding of thinking and give some degrees of new clarity to individual thinking and their strategic direction from grasping the risks, potentials and value opportunities offered when so many leaders can find time to come together and exchange.

These reports (Whitepapers) are a storehouse of knowledge, facts and suggested actions that need to be taken. The Whitepapers found here cover Climate issues, Green Deal views, Resilience, Circular Transformation, Global Value Chains, Electricity views , Securing the Energy Transition and plenty more.

For me, the weekend focus was on the Energy Transition following on from their recent Davos event and the series of reports co-sponsored with different organizations built up over many years.

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Our Power Grids require Reliability, Resilience and Risk management.

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The pressure on our Power Grids needs urgent attention

There is a growing, possibly intense focus and awareness that our Energy Grids worldwide are in serious trouble.

The significant changing consumption needs and generation patterns are causing significant concerns that existing ageing infrastructure is becoming a major source of risk to power grid safety, reliability and financial exposure and in failing to deliver power on the expected 24 x 7, we need.

If you look at ten of the top issues that are causing a growing crisis

  1. Ageing or outdated infrastructure
  2. Supply chain failures are delaying infrastructure equipment changes.
  3. A continued public opposition delaying infrastructure options and bureaucratic barriers
  4. There is a continued lack of sizable funding to make major changes
  5. System redundancies and stranded assets and the issues of legacy write-offs
  6. The increased complexity of the grid is still unclear in its final generation mix design
  7. Cyber Attacks are continuing and exposing significant weakness
  8. Extreme weather events are growing and exposing grid vulnerabilities.
  9. Previously poor project management, inconsistencies in capital spending
  10. Changing demand needs, the acceleration of electrification and the lack of new infrastructure

The need is to find effective responses and considerations of the options, managing change simultaneously while maintaining increasing power demand.

The energy system is being disrupted, and where there are levels of high disruption, there is always uncertainty, debate and learning to take risker views of the future, creating a lot of unease and hesitation. As quoted by one senior person, “we have an inadequate view of what – positively, and in detail – we’re building towards.

As the sector transforms at such an accelerating rate, the move towards ambitious decarbonization targets has required that clean energy is explored in all those options and required to be pushed to the forefront of future solutions. Integrating that variable green energy onto the grid and hardening infrastructure assets against extreme weather are proving some industry’s most pressing challenges.

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