(More) North Seas of Change - Moving the Needle

Following on from my thoughts on “all change but what’s really changed” in the past two years around the Energy Transition, besides the awful situation in Ukraine.

So: what can we do to move the needle?

Running an “Ekiden Ultra-Marathon”

I am greatly in debt to my colleagues at the CIGRE organization (the global association leading the development of power system thinking) for input into the debate around the key issues for addressing the energy transition and especially the North Sea developments.

Simply put: if we are to have enough resources to deliver our energy transition goals between now and 2050, then we need to move to a much more strategic approach to attracting, developing, retraining and valuing the expertise, skills and capabilities of our current and future workforce. This starts with school and higher education students, moving through how we will need to revisit how our industry trains and retrains our employees throughout their careers, to how we can best value the expertise and experience of our most experienced team members in the period before retirement. The whole topic of how AI can support this is a subject for a separate discussion on another day.

Ekiden marathon? Yes: as my good friend and colleague Leo keeps telling me, the energy transition is not a sprint. It is a marathon, or even an “ultra-marathon”, over the next 50+ years whilst we run more than ever before in a coordinated, pan-dimensional energy industry team. So, it’s a bit like an Ekiden Marathon (team running event) over a huge planning horizon.  

So how can we mirror thins thinking into the energy transition? I am as always indebted to the outstanding Professor Dennis Sherwood and his reflections around creativity, innovation and systems thinking in the energy industry, together with his work around education. Do check out, by the way, his most recent book (“Creativity for Scientists and Engineers”, winner of the Specialist Business Book of the Year 2023 and my small contribution of the “Building NEMO” case study). It’s amazing that the energy transition is being recognized now in such eminent circles. Perhaps what is more pertinent is that there is growing understanding that some real innovative, creative thinking is needed right now as to how we can knit together the technical, societal and human aspects of the energy transition and how we address the challenges of the North Sea as Europe’s future energy powerhouse. Building NEMO is all about how a group of teams came together in an adverse situation, challenged the norms of open collaboration and delivering an exemplar project on time (or actually a few days early to be truthful), with outstanding health and safety and in great teaming with all stakeholders across multiple cultures and countries.

In the short term, we need 300 more colleagues – right now - to build wind turbine blades and nascelles in Le Havre.

So: how can we now "up the ambition"?

Are there really parallels for developing the energy infrastructure North Sea? I know that the scale of the North Sea development is orders of magnitude more than building the NEMO HVDC interconnector. However, I do believe that there are important learning points around finding ways to work as a team across industries and as a group of dependent stakeholders supporting the energy transition.

I was recently asked by a colleague: “is there an overall plan for the energy infrastructure developments in the North Sea and back on land? Well, I for one really hope so and certainly with minds far more eminent than mine coming up with some dynamic solutions.

For sure, the “why” will remain (decarbonization), whilst the “what”, “who” and “how” will develop massively over time as we learn together. With Andy Denne of Living Teams, we continue to develop the concepts around “Self-Healing Teams”, since you can be certain that “head office” or central government will not be coming anytime soon to save us from the ever-growing demands and workload. Our industry workload is high, increasing and with no end in sight to the growth curve. So, we need to work out ways to do more with the limited resources to hand, be this the intelligent use of AI, better procurement models based around standardization in design and process, and recycling including a more circular approach to the current and new technologies being deployed (and there are already some great examples of recycling legacy wind turbine blades and power transformers).

As far as our energy industry is concerned, our focus has to be now on “industrializing the energy transition”, a phrase that I coined at the Offshore Energy Conference in Amsterdam last autumn. Like never before, we need to work together, as not only an energy industry but also as a Western European community if we have any chance to hit our 2030 and 2050 goals for decarbonization.

I really think that Dennis has a point about a systems approach to all of this.

(Still) lots to do.  

#energytransition #decarbonisation #powerthroughcollaboration #teampurple #CIGRE