Discover how BCG helped Ergon Retail, an Australian utility, transform its business to improve employee engagement, boost customer happiness, and thrive in the energy transition.
Playing in the power and utilities arena has never been more challenging—or more important. Today’s utilities must drive the uptake of renewable energy sources, enable behind-the-meter systems, leverage digital technologies, and grapple with climate events—while still meeting their regulatory obligations. Our gas and electric power consulting team helps players find a path through these challenges—and any others the future may hold.
Our Approach to Supporting Power and Utilities Players
At BCG, we use our deep commercial, technical, and regulatory expertise to support a broad range of companies, advising both regulated and unregulated power and gas players worldwide on their transmission and distribution, generation, and retail businesses.
Our power and utilities consulting team enables companies to set a strategic direction and drive toward a net zero future. In addition to advising on strategy, we help our clients build new capabilities, such as flexibility management, and solve difficult operational issues, such as delivering massive capital projects in a supply chain-constrained environment. We also support their engagement with governments and regulators on market design and regulatory reviews.
Zero-Ready Strategic Direction
We help companies both design regulatory and market development strategies and create operating models to push them toward net zero. With gas players, this involves preparing for an existential transformation, as electrification leads to a reduction in demand for gas, while renewable fuels (such as hydrogen and biogas) are expected to replace natural gas in many sectors that are hard to electrify.
Zero-Ready Ways of Working
We support our clients in evolving the ways they work across the following three key areas of change:
- Plan and Fund the Next Generation of Energy Systems: Our gas and electric power consulting team helps clients build capabilities and design their transmission and distribution networks to enable the uptake and utilization of renewable energy resources, including distributed energy resources (DERs), and electrification of future demand. We help players not only make smart decisions across interconnected energy commodities but also take into account the impact of climate change.
- Design, Build, and Connect for the Future: Power and utilities companies today face significant challenges building the infrastructure needed to enable a decarbonized world, and doing so at an unprecedented speed and scale. Our utilities consulting team helps clients de-risk the delivery of large capital programs and megaprojects and operate effectively in a constrained supply market. We help companies both build advanced internal capabilities, such as digitally enabled engineering, and redesign connection processes to accommodate renewables, new load, and battery storage.
- Operate and Balance the Network: Our power transmission and distribution clients need to manage supply and demand that is far more volatile than it was in the past. This requires both changes in systems and tools to ensure much greater system visibility and new ways of interacting with customers. We help players unlock hidden capacity in power systems through a range of approaches.
Zero-Ready Initiatives for a Cost-Effective Energy Transition
We use AI to help power and utilities companies cut their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, achieve end-to-end productivity improvements (from advanced asset management to field-force efficiency), and lower the risk of wildfires through better vegetation management. By doing so, we help reduce not only companies’ costs but also their carbon impact. In the case of emissions, we begin by carrying out an assessment by scope. Next, we create initiatives, such as fleet electrification and routing optimization, that enable companies to achieve their net zero targets, using computer models to simulate the effect on emissions and costs. We then develop a sequenced roadmap of initiatives, starting with the highest-impact ones. Finally, we monitor client emissions to ensure that the roadmap is successful.
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May 19, 2022
Digitizing E.ON’s Core Business
BCG helped E.ON reshape its core business into a powerful tool capable of addressing the challenges facing the power and utilities industry, such as how to mitigate climate change.
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July 23, 2021
Eneco to be Climate Neutral by 2035
The Rotterdam-based energy company aims for carbon neutrality by 2035. Learn about their “One Planet” plan—and why it’s so important to act now on climate change.
Our Power and Utilities Solutions and Tools
In addition to our partnerships with global innovation players, BCG leverages a wide range of leading-edge proprietary solutions and tools to help clients optimize their transmission and distribution of electricity and gas activities. The following are a few examples:
Asset Intelligence in Power Generation
This comprehensive solution enhances asset management for power and utilities players by using AI to improve maintenance strategies, prioritize work orders, and predict equipment failures. It includes risk-based decision-making, intelligent scheduling, and seamless execution through mobile apps, thereby reducing manual tasks. The approach goes beyond predictive maintenance, optimizing efficiency and reliability across asset management processes.
Through AI, Deep Customer Engagement AI helps utilities optimize customer management by delivering the most impactful sales actions at the best times using the best channels. Doing so enables companies to increase customer acquisition, reduce churn, and enhance per-account value.
Networks.AI
A single platform, Networks.AI brings together BCG’s digital tools for addressing myriad grid-related challenges at scale, whether it’s planning power transmission and distribution networks, prioritizing asset control centers and investments, enhancing field force productivity, or improving customer support and management. It also helps players create rapid business impact once they’ve selected the right tool.
Our Latest Insights on Power and Utilities
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Achieving net zero will require driving an energy transition with unprecedented speed. That transition promises to have far-reaching implications.
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July 31, 2023
Forward-looking players are changing the way they purchase renewable power. Other companies should follow their lead.
Meet Some of Our Power and Utilities Consulting Leaders
BCG’s power and utilities consulting team helps clients navigate today’s energy landscape through our deep expertise in both power networks and the transmission and distribution of electricity. The following are some of our experts in power and utilities:
