Leading the transformation to green energy

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, one of the Denmark's largest energy producer is answering the call. Eighty-six percent of the energy it produced in 2019 came from green sources, making the business the world’s most sustainable energy company that year. And in 2020, Ørsted is the world's most sustainable company, and aims to increase green energy production to 99 per cent by 2025. 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.

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.