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Utility Transformation: Scenario Planning Process and Outputs

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Advanced Energy Centre
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Utility Transformation: Scenario Planning Process and Outputs

Objective: Support utilities’ understanding of the pace of change in the energy sector, and inform intentional decisions to capture value and opportunities in a changingenergy landscape.

The Advanced Energy Centre facilitates thefollowing process to achieve its core objective:

  1. Trends: Identify trends of energy system transformation
    • Trends are identified from a horizon scan of topics surfaced in key industry publications and conferences, customized interviews with senior leaders relevant to the clients’ business, and a qualitative cross-impact analysis of key trends, drivers, and issues. E.g. The electricity generation
      mix is changing or environmental stresses lead to greater need for resiliency
  2. Uncertainty: Identify trends that have a high degree of impact and uncertainty
    • Through a facilitated workshop, participants will identify priority trends per the example below. This produced a list of priority trends, namely, those with a high degree of impact on businesses and varying degrees of certainty. 
  3. Drivers: Consider what is driving these trends
    • Through executive interviews and a literature/media scan, the Advanced Energy Centre  considers insights from a diverse range of energy players, and trusted thought leaders to identify key trends that indicate sector transformation.
  4. Scenarios: Develop plausible and future scenarios
    • Possible futures are developed based on the underlying drivers of change in the energy sector, as well as trends with a high degree of impact and a high degree of uncertainty on utilities businesses.
  5. Strategy: Draw strategic insights 
    • Eg. If grid parity happens as early as 2021, what insights does this provide into questions around future-ready business, or future-ready infrastructure?

As a neutral third party in the scenario planning process, the Advanced Energy Centre ensures that research is holistic- capturing political, economic,regulatory, environmental, social, and technical datapoints. The Advanced Energy Centre will also conduct interviews using a specialized scenario planning approach to draw key insights from industry experts.Insights will be captured in an anonymized format for use during the scenario planning process.

For more information: https://www.marsdd.com/systems-change/advanced-energy-centre/utility-tr…

Contact information:

Jesika Briones, Manager International Programs

jbriones@marsdd.com