Ørsted
Leading the transformation to green energy
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As CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels contribute to a warming planet, there’s never been a more urgent need to scale the generation and use of clean energy. Ørsted, Denmark’s largest energy producer, is answering the call. Already the world’s most sustainable energy company, by 2025 it aims to produce 99% of its energy from green sources. That 2025 carbon neutral target is remarkable, considering Ørsted ran on less than 20 per cent renewable sources as recently as 2006.
To meet its long-term goals, Ørsted saw an opportunity to build, own and operate assets better and more efficiently using digital tools. Company leadership recognised they needed an agile operating model to rapidly innovate and deliver new technical capabilities, and to be responsive to emerging trends and data. We’ve worked with Ørsted IT to fundamentally transform the organisation, changing the culture, building capabilities and strengthening processes so it’s better equipped to create a world that runs entirely on green energy.
Key successes
- Tasks that used to take up to two years now take as little as two months.
- Ørsted is on course to reach its goal of producing 99 per cent green energy by 2025.
Ahead of the competition
Ørsted grasped the potential of wind power early and built the world’s first offshore wind farm in 1991. The company’s leadership saw a future in which wind wouldn’t simply complement the use of fossil fuels but replace them altogether. That has meant stepping away from oil and gas and setting a target to turn off coal by 2023.
The energy industry isn’t very digital, and companies are trying to figure out what digital means for them. We have an opportunity to define that. We want to be the ones driving and spearheading the transformation to green energy. The offshore wind business is growing and we’re the leaders, which means we need to be the digital leaders too.”
The energy producer wanted to stay ahead of the competition and retain its status as the world’s most sustainable energy company. To do that, Ørsted needed advanced digital capabilities, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics and automation, to let it increase yield and reduce the cost of operations.
Thinking and working differently
If you’re going to build an entirely new sort of energy company, you want to build it in a new way. And that’s why Ørsted is creating a digital and agile organisation.
To make this transformation possible, our digital, design and agile experts overhauled Ørsted’s IT operating model, identifying customer value streams and organising multi-disciplinary teams around them to deliver enduring results. Teams can now develop services together based on data-driven insights, like client usage patterns, which prove the value they bring to customers, not the internal function they support. This meant training staff to work in an agile way: developing, launching and scaling services in short bursts.
By working in this new way and adopting innovative technologies, Ørsted has become a data-driven organisation.
In helping us adopt an agile approach, tasks that used to take up to 24 months now take as little as two months. Enabling us to become more agile across the organisation has been key to our ability to pull far ahead of the competition.”
Often, organisations focus on process and forget about people. The key to being an agile organisation is to put your employees and customers at the heart of everything you do. That’s what we did here. We worked with Ørsted to focus on what their customers want and give their people a way to work together more collaboratively.”
Ørsted is leading by example with its vision to create a world that runs entirely on green energy. It’s the global leader in wind power, with 30 per cent market share. And its transformation has also turned heads around the world. A recent report published in Harvard Business Review recognised Ørsted as one of the top 20 business transformations of the last decade. And the work has put the company on course to reach its goal of producing 99 per cent green energy by 2025.
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