Energy infrastructure projects include initiatives to develop, upgrade, or maintain the systems and facilities that generate, transmit, and distribute energy resources. These projects help create a reliable and sustainable energy supply to meet society’s demands.

The importance of energy infrastructure projects cannot be overstated. Not only are they essential for powering homes, businesses, industries, and transportation systems, they also play a vital role in facilitating the transition to cleaner, more sustainable energy sources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.

Given the complexity, scale, and far-reaching implications, understanding and applying best practice throughout planning, execution, and operation of these projects is crucial.

Stakeholder involvement

Engaging stakeholders is pivotal for the success of energy infrastructure projects. Identifying internal and external stakeholders early on and involving them throughout the project lifecycle leads to more successful project outcomes in the long term. Internal stakeholders may include project managers, engineers, environmental experts, procurement specialists, and delivery and site managers. External stakeholders can include communities, interest groups, regulators, and other entities that may be impacted by or have an interest in the project.

Gathering input from these varied stakeholders at the earliest possible stage allows for a comprehensive understanding of their perspectives, concerns, and requirements. This input can range from high-level informing to direct responsibility for specific actions or deliverables. By fostering open communication and collaboration, project teams can extract high-quality insights and leverage the collective expertise of all parties involved.

Effective communication and collaboration strategies should be tailored to each stakeholder group's unique needs and preferences. This may involve regular meetings, workshops, online forums, or other channels that facilitate two-way dialogue and active participation. Clear communication channels and a transparent decision-making process help build trust, address concerns and ensure that stakeholder inputs are genuinely considered and incorporated into the project plan. Technology platforms like Optioneer can be extremely helpful both for sharing project plans and information in an accessible way and also for collating feedback via comments. Inviting multiple stakeholders into a project space ensures that no voice is left unheard.

In some instances, projects can get stuck at the permitting stage due to objections from the public. Engaging stakeholders early and maintaining consistent communication throughout the project lifecycle helps identify these risks and challenges and creates a sense of ownership and buy-in among all parties involved. A collaborative approach can lead to more informed decision-making, better alignment with stakeholder expectations, and, ultimately, more successful energy infrastructure projects that move smoothly through permitting stages with no surprises.

Learning from past projects

It's rare for an infrastructure project to be a complete novelty in the industry. Failing to learn from past projects is a missed opportunity and increases the risk of repeating avoidable mistakes.

The first step is to identify and document lessons by conducting a thorough review of project documentation, stakeholder feedback, and other relevant sources. This process requires an open mind, where successes and failures are viewed as learning opportunities.

Once lessons are identified, the next step is to map them to project milestones. This mapping exercise ensures that learnings are applied at the appropriate stages of a new project. Lessons related to stakeholder management may be particularly relevant during the early planning phases, while those relating to construction are more likely to be applicable to the execution phase, for example.

By carefully studying and applying lessons from previous projects, infrastructure developers can increase their chances of success, avoid common pitfalls and capitalise on their own proven, best practices. Using software like Optioneer can be a game-changer for applying best practice to future projects as constraints, project structure, naming conventions, and reporting requirements can be duplicated from an existing project, leapfrogging multiple project set-up workflows and ensuring that best practices and the organisation’s methodology are routinely applied. This approach helps streamline processes and fosters a culture of continuous improvement, where each project builds on the collected wisdom of past projects.

Project planning and goal alignment

In project management it’s best practice to set specific, measurable milestones that align with the project's critical path and mark progress towards a project’s end goal. They serve as checkpoints to evaluate progress, identify potential roadblocks, and can be adjusted as necessary to keep the project on track.

In infrastructure design, stakeholders have varying priorities—engineers seek feasible routes, environmentalists aim to minimise impact, project managers focus on cost and risk, and communities want to protect local environs. These conflicting objectives mean optimising planning around a single goal or objective is ineffective. Multi-Objective Optimisation (MOO) is an approachthat significantly improves planning outcomes, but it can be difficult to implement without supporting technology.

Optioneer integrates MOO into the planning, routing, and siting of cables, overhead lines, and pipelines for energy infrastructure projects. This allows for the simultaneous optimisation of multiple goals, balancing costs, feasibility, and environmental impact.

With MOO, project managers, engineers and environmental experts can customise models and compare multiple solutions side by side. Features like heatmaps visually represent trade-offs, aiding in informed decision-making and identifying potential routing corridors. This is incredibly helpful for infrastructure project teams and developers because they can be sure that all objectives are taken into account and can choose which weighting matters most for the routing and siting options they select for their infrastructure planning. If milestones need to be adjusted or goals change, it’s easy to adjust and iterate plans in Optioneer by changing parameters and the weighting given to objectives.

Once a route option is selected, it’s important to continuously monitor and evaluate the project's alignment with goals and stakeholder expectations throughout its lifecycle. Establishing clear communication channels and reporting mechanisms ensures ongoing transparency and accountability. Optioneer's MOO not only automates the process of balancing competing objectives, clearly showing which goal has been prioritised, but also speeds up reporting and communication with 3D visualisation, map exports and route flyover animations.

Collaboration and knowledge sharing

Successful energy infrastructure projects thrive on collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams and stakeholders. By improving the ‘bus factor’, which refers to the number of team members who would need to be incapacitated before the project grinds to a halt, developers and utilities can build resilience and reduce their reliance on any single individual.

Effective collaboration begins with breaking down silos and encouraging cross-functional teamwork. Project managers can help by facilitating regular meetings, workshops, and feedback sessions that bring together experts from multiple disciplines, like engineering, procurement, environmental management and community relations. This collaborative approach allows all perspectives to be considered and potential issues to be identified early and addressed.

Knowledge sharing is equally important, as it prevents the loss of valuable insights and lessons learned from previous projects. Establishing knowledge management systems, like centralised databases or deploying an all-in-one solution like Optioneer, can help capture and disseminate best practices and technical expertise. Mentorship programs and job shadowing opportunities can also help transfer tacit knowledge from experienced professionals to newer team members.

Leveraging digital collaboration tools and virtual workspaces can enhance real-time communication, document sharing, and remote collaboration, particularly in projects spanning multiple locations or with geographically dispersed teams. Optioneer can be especially helpful where team members are time-poor or working in different time zones. Asynchronous commenting and tagging mean that team members can still collaborate and discuss across the full 24-hour period in the same platform.

Risk management

Effective risk management is non-negotiable for large-scale energy infrastructure projects, which often involve significant investments, complex technical challenges, and potential environmental and social impacts. Project teams can minimise disruptions, delays, and cost overruns by identifying potential risks early and creating mitigation strategies.

The first step is conducting a comprehensive risk assessment. This involves identifying all potential risks associated with the project, including technical risks, environmental risks, regulatory risks and social risks. The risk assessment should consider each risk's likelihood and potential impact, allowing the team to prioritise and develop appropriate mitigation strategies.

Risk monitoring and control are also essential throughout the project lifecycle. This involves regularly reviewing and updating the risk register, monitoring key risk indicators, and implementing corrective actions as needed.

Any technologies employed to give visibility of risks earlier in the project lifecycle, can give high value to the project team. A risk uncovered while planning is still ‘on paper’ rather than in the field, can be avoided before costs are sunk. Visibility of issues which may raise community objections can have a huge impact if uncovered early, as not only can rework be avoided, but relationships with the community are more positive overall as plans feel more appropriate on first pass. Software like Optioneer can help give early visibility to multiple risk factors due to the large amount of GIS data pre-loaded into the project space, mapped against the project’s objectives, balanced via custom criteria and displayed with advanced visualisation techniques to give instant clarity on avoidable risks.

Environmental considerations

Addressing environmental concerns from the outset ensures regulatory compliance, promotes sustainable practices, and minimises the project's ecological footprint.

Comprehensive environmental impact assessments (EIA) are generally needed to identify potential risks and develop mitigation strategies. These assessments include man-made elements in the environment like cultural heritage, landscapes and the visual impact of development, as well as the impact on resources like forestry and hydrology, animal and plant life habitats. In many locations, regulators are moving towards Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) where development must leave the environment not just restored but improved. To achieve this, an environmental baseline must be set at the planning stage so that either the baseline can be restored or the net gain evidenced post-development.

Compliance with local, national, and international environmental regulations is essential or there can be financial consequences. Failing to comply can result in a need to buy biodiversity credits or an offset against the baseline. Developers may need to pay to traverse an area, for example an area of commercial forest. Staying current with evolving regulations and industry best practices helps projects avoid these penalties.

Lessons learned and continuous improvement

If capturing lessons learned throughout the project lifecycle is the magic bullet for continuous improvement, project on project, reliably documenting successes, challenges, and areas for improvement, is the linchpin. Documentation should be comprehensive, capturing all stakeholders' insights, including project managers, engineers, environmental experts, procurement teams, delivery and site managers, regulators and community representatives.

Once captured, improvements can be regularly implemented based on these insights. Whether this involves refining processes, providing additional training and resources, or implementing new technologies, actively incorporating lessons learned will enhance an organisation’s project delivery capabilities and avoid the repetition of past mistakes.

Open communication and knowledge sharing among project teams creates an environment where individuals feel comfortable discussing challenges and sharing innovative solutions. A centralised knowledge repository to store and disseminate lessons learned from previous projects can be a valuable resource for future project teams, enabling them to access insights and best practices. Platforms like Optioneer can also work well in this context, acting as a full project record for past projects as well as providing a simple way to bring successful strategies, approaches and methodologies into new projects.

Conclusion

Best practice for energy infrastructure projects is a combination of the universal laws for successful project management, combined with the organisation-specific lessons learned from past projects and the ability that the project team has to apply these lessons to future projects. The team also needs an agile mindset to notice problems quickly and move swiftly to innovative solutions. Success hinges on risk management, monitoring, clear communication and regulatory knowledge. The sweet spot is getting all of these processes, techniques, learnings and approaches working together. When this happens, developers and utilities have the best chance of successfully completing energy infrastructure projects on time and on budget, with the lowest possible impact on local communities and the environment.

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