Building faster, planning further: Energy lessons between the UK and Middle East
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At a glance
The UK and Middle East have valuable energy infrastructure lessons to exchange. Drawing on experience across both markets, we explore how earlier decision-making and coordinated infrastructure planning can support faster delivery, while a long-term approach to asset management and resilience can help today’s investments remain reliable for decades.
Drawing on experience across the UK and Middle East, this insight examines how earlier decision-making, coordinated infrastructure planning and long-term asset management can support faster delivery and more resilient energy infrastructure.
The UK and Middle East have useful lessons to exchange about energy infrastructure: how to turn ambition into coordinated delivery, and how to ensure the assets built today remain reliable for decades.
For GHD’s Neil Murdoch, Technical Services Director, who has worked across both markets, one of the clearest differences is how ambition translates into decisions and delivery. The direction towards decarbonisation may be clear, but competing technologies, investment choices and uncertainty about future demand can make organisations reluctant to commit.
This challenge connects to a wider question raised by GHD’s Tom Foley, EMEA Energy Leader, in the recent Energy Without Borders discussion: whether infrastructure can continue to be planned and delivered as a collection of individual projects when it increasingly needs to function as an interconnected system.
Together, their perspectives point to a common challenge. How can organisations make decisions early enough to maintain momentum, while understanding the dependencies and long-term consequences of what they build?
For GHD’s Neil Murdoch, Technical Services Director, who has worked across both markets, one of the clearest differences is how ambition translates into decisions and delivery. The direction towards decarbonisation may be clear, but competing technologies, investment choices and uncertainty about future demand can make organisations reluctant to commit.
This challenge connects to a wider question raised by GHD’s Tom Foley, EMEA Energy Leader, in the recent Energy Without Borders discussion: whether infrastructure can continue to be planned and delivered as a collection of individual projects when it increasingly needs to function as an interconnected system.
Together, their perspectives point to a common challenge. How can organisations make decisions early enough to maintain momentum, while understanding the dependencies and long-term consequences of what they build?
From ambition to action
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Planning beyond individual projects
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Building for long term outcomes
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Designing resilience into the system
Resilience adds another dimension. Murdoch highlighted the need to examine how infrastructure will perform under changing climate conditions, physical disruption and cyber threats.
Choices that appear efficient at project level can create dependencies across a wider system. Greater digital connectivity, for example, can improve visibility and control while introducing new considerations around access, security and human oversight.
These trade-offs need to be understood alongside cost and delivery time, with assumptions tested against a range of future conditions.
For Murdoch, the opportunity lies in combining the ability to coordinate investment and move decisively with a long-term understanding of assets, operations and risk.
Building faster is therefore not simply about accelerating individual projects. It requires earlier decisions about how projects fit together, what they depend on and how they contribute to the wider system. Getting those decisions right creates a stronger foundation for moving at pace today without limiting the choices available tomorrow.
Choices that appear efficient at project level can create dependencies across a wider system. Greater digital connectivity, for example, can improve visibility and control while introducing new considerations around access, security and human oversight.
These trade-offs need to be understood alongside cost and delivery time, with assumptions tested against a range of future conditions.
For Murdoch, the opportunity lies in combining the ability to coordinate investment and move decisively with a long-term understanding of assets, operations and risk.
Building faster is therefore not simply about accelerating individual projects. It requires earlier decisions about how projects fit together, what they depend on and how they contribute to the wider system. Getting those decisions right creates a stronger foundation for moving at pace today without limiting the choices available tomorrow.
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