Create Lasting Impact
Power is now the constraint on growth
How do we secure the electricity and the renewable supply the plan depends on?
How do we secure the electricity and the renewable supply the plan depends on?
The growth plan assumed the electrons would be there. A new line, an electrified process, a data centre, a fleet going electric, a site in a region where the grid was never asked to carry this load. Then the connection date slipped by three years, the renewable PPA that looked cheap in the model is now priced on a market that has moved, the energy clause in the main supply contract was written for 2019 and the sustainability report has promised a share of renewables that procurement cannot source at the price finance approved.
So the plan that was about demand has become a plan about supply. The CFO sees an energy bill that behaves like a second rent. The COO sees a plant whose output is set by a connection queue. The Chief Sustainability Officer sees a commitment with a date and no contract behind it. And the CEO sees that the next fifteen years of the business depend on a set of decisions that have no single owner.
What to secure, on which horizon, through which combination of contracts, assets and flexibility.
The decisions are long and they are linked: whether to contract, generate or store; how much of the load to make flexible so that it costs less to supply; which sites to grow and which not to, given what the grid will allow; how to carry the price risk between the company, its suppliers and its clients. Taken one by one, each produces a reasonable contract. Taken together over fifteen years, they decide whether the company has an energy strategy or a collection of exposures, then which of its assets will still be worth what the books say when the climate and the rules have moved.
The work is Long-Term Resilience. It is built for horizons longer than a planning cycle, because that is where the value of a long asset is decided.
We stress the current architecture first: the financial and operational structure against three systemic shocks, a climate transition event, a regulatory acceleration, a technological disruption. Where it fails, at which trigger, how fast, which of those failures an architecture can be built to absorb. For treasury that means the cash, covenant and capital consequences of each scenario, in a form investors and lenders can read; for the board it means scenarios structured as governance inputs with a named trigger and an escalation threshold.
Then we design the resilience the plan needs: the supply architecture across contracts, own generation, storage and flexibility; the capital structure that carries it; the operational redundancy; and the stakeholder layer that energy plans tend to leave out, the community whose consent a new asset depends on and the ecosystem whose water or land the operation uses. For the Chief Sustainability Officer and the COO the physical climate exposure of each site is modelled as a constraint on supply before it is a disclosure. For the CFO the energy decisions are written as asset decisions, with their return and their risk, because that is how the board approves them.
What leaves the room is a resilience architecture and a ten to fifteen year roadmap of investment and governance: what is contracted, built or made flexible, when, at what cost and under which trigger the plan changes. The roadmap comes with the performance indicators that show the leadership the erosion before it reaches the accounts.
In the case below we take the revenue a fleet is quoted for vehicle-to-grid and bring it down to what the fleet keeps after three deductions: the energy lost on the round trip, the aggregator's share and the wear on the battery. Four clauses written before signature set what each deduction costs, and the downside case they produce is the figure a CFO can approve. The energy strategy is built out of numbers like that one.
The battery sets the losses and the wear; the contract sets what they cost the fleet.
ReadMaxime Ferrand, Senior Partner. Sixteen years at Enedis across innovation, risk management and EV-charging deployment, from engineering projects to Chief of Staff. He holds the system: the grid, the connection, the flexibility and the physical reality of what a site can draw and when.
Oluwafemi Senjobi, Associate Partner. Six years at Deloitte, then corporate finance at American Tower across infrastructure and energy. He holds the capital side: the contracts and assets modelled as investments, the risk carried in each and the language in which lenders and boards approve them.
Responsibility is what keeps performance from consuming the business it depends on, across customers, resources, technology, value chains and all stakeholders. Energy is the resource where that sentence is now written on the invoice.
Read the card in Our Approach: ResponsibilityThe connection date that slipped, the PPA that moved, the commitment without a contract behind it. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.