Our  CWW group’s Young Professional Network (YPN) gathered together and identified the potential issues utility firms will face in the future and came up with ways they can prepare for these future challenges. Such thoughts were compiled into the quick scan “Trend analysis YPN Wake-up call Cordence Utilities Summit 2018” that you can download below.

This document, written by YPN members from Alfa Consulting, Horvath, Oresys, and Twynstra Gudde, identifies 4 Utilities Mega Trends that will greatly affect how the utility sector will look in 2050:

1. Big Data

Why should we care? Using increasing vast data to enhance pricing strategies, allows utilities companies, boost customer satisfaction, and improve production efficiency. Big data offers utilities opportunity to improve efficiency, the maximizing profit. The combination of smart meters and Time of Use Tariffs will generate lots of new data and enable pricing strategies and balance supply.

What does this trend demand from utilities? How can utilities be a forerunner in Big Data and use it for a better customer relationship, efficiency and diminished risks? Oh, and what about the privacy of customers?

2. Customer Empowerment

Why should we care? Today’s savvy and digital customer, armed with a smartphone, demands availability of all information at any time, and from anywhere.

What does this trend demand from utilities? What role will utility firms have in a future where customers generate their own energy and even can monitor/ regulate this through their smart meters? How can utility companies now act on this development to retain the customers, whose power keeps growing?

3. Circular Economy

Why should we care? We are running out of fossil fuels, metals and nutrients thanks to our ‘take-make-consume-dispose’ linear economy.

What does this trend demand from utilities? The utilities sector is centered around natural resources, mainly water and energy. Scarcity makes it profitable to increase and optimize the reuse of materials. Instead of processing ‘waste’, utilities will become resource producers. What role should utilities have in ensuring our material supply? Whose responsibility is it to regain valuable resources?

4. Towards zero-emission

Why should we care? For those that have been living under rock: Reducing O2-emisions is the only way to prevent the earth from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 and preventing irreversible climate change and destruction of our planet as we know it.

What does this trend demand from utilities? We will need a complete shift to renewable energy sources and technology: solar, wind, hydrogen, tidal, biogas, geo-thermic. These sources demand different production, new infrastructure, more public place and they will challenge the reliability of our energy supply. What role should de utility sector play in stimulating the energy transition?

Download the full document here