Energy Leaders and the energy transition: Matthew Wright, Ørsted
The energy transition is a big strategic challenge. How have Ørsted approached the issue of the energy transition and a move to a lower-carbon economy?
“We were a company that has a strong presence in oil and natural gas, a traditional vertically integrated utility based out of Denmark and we’ve transformed into a pure play renewable energy company that’s going global.
DONG stood for Danish Oil and Natural Gas. Not everybody knew that but that’s what it stood for. If you sell the ONG of your name, the oil and natural gas business, you have to change your name so that’s what we did. We changed our name to Ørsted, which is named after a Danish scientist called Hans Christian Ørsted that discovered electromagnetism in 1820. The bigger part of the name change though was to signify a break with the legacy business of oil and gas into a pure play renewable energy company and more than the name change we adopted an entirely new mission or vision for the organisation which is to create a world that runs entirely on green energy.
Offshore wind’s obviously been the focus for this international drive and we see other renewable technologies playing a part in Ørsted’s strategy going forward. If we want to create a world that runs entirely on green energy we’re not going to just do it with offshore wind. The best offshore wind farms have a load factor of about 50% which is good and a lot better than some other renewable technologies but we need some other dispatchable technologies and/or storage technologies to complement that entirely green world. That’s why we’re heavily into storage and not just looking at lithium-ion and short-term storage (albeit we already have a couple of projects in the UK, some in the US and looking to combine that with our other interests, whether its wind or solar) but longer-term storage, again whether its hydrogen or ammonia or whatever, but certainly things that we are looking at as a company because they will be required to round out this entirely green energy paradigm that we’re trying to build.
In the UK if I can use that as an example, we are a supplier of both gas and electricity actually to commercial industrial customers, but increasingly that relationship is about what we can do to bring down their costs in a sustainable way. We’re going beyond being a commoditised energy supplier to more of a partner including behind the metre in investments that will help them hit their own sustainability goals. We’ve developed a concept of energy as a service where we will invest in whatever - it could be storage or biomass boilers or whatever - behind the metres of our customers to help them with their own sustainability objectives. I think it’s a much deeper relationship that we’re forging with our customers and it’s one that reflects the overall purpose of our company which is to bring forward renewable investment.”
