Utilities face a genuinely difficult planning problem. On one side, aging assets that need maintaining, repairing or replacing. On the other, the pressure to grow the network, increase capacity and deliver on the energy transition. There is no perfect solution. Every investment decision involves trade-offs, and the stakes are high.

Ibon Ruiz Escribano, Senior Manager Solutions Consulting Europe at IFS Copperleaf, frames the challenge clearly: the goal is to optimise the plan, maximise its value, and make the right investment decisions at the right time. The difficulty is that the variables are many and the constraints are real.

Fin Jennrich, Customer Experience Regional Lead DACH at IFS Copperleaf, goes deeper on the planning challenge itself. Before you can make good decisions across hundreds or thousands of competing projects, you need clarity on what value means to your specific organisation. Reliability? Decarbonisation? Cost reduction? Once that foundation is in place, the second challenge is execution: finding resources, scaling up, getting projects onto the street. And in today’s volatile environment, building one plan and asking for approval is no longer enough. Organisations running what-if scenarios are discovering which projects are genuinely robust across different conditions and which ones are fragile.

Watch the video to hear both perspectives on where capital planning is getting harder and what the organisations doing it well have in common.