What 30 years in engineering has taught me about planning for the future

Being elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering is a great honour. It has also prompted me to reflect on more than 30 years in the electricity industry, how much the system has changed and what the next chapter will demand of engineers. 

One thing that strikes me is how much further ahead we now need to think. 

At NESO, that can mean looking at what might happen in the next few minutes, preparing for the winter ahead, or planning for an energy system decades from now. The timescales are very different, but the engineering challenge running through them is remarkably similar: understanding uncertainty well enough to make good decisions. 

I've seen that challenge evolve significantly over my career, particularly as we've moved towards a low-carbon electricity system. It has transformed how we operate the grid and required new solutions to keep the system secure. 

Programmes such as Dynamic Containment and our Pathfinders have shown what can be achieved when engineering expertise and market innovation come together. But increasingly, we need to understand the energy system as a whole: how people use energy, where it is produced, how it moves around the country and how we keep supply and demand in balance as conditions change. 

That means thinking across very different timescales. 

In the control room, the focus can be on what is happening now and what might happen in the next few minutes. Supply and demand are constantly changing, network conditions can shift, and our engineers need to understand those changes and act to keep electricity flowing securely. 

Look further ahead and the questions change. Over the coming hours, days and seasons, forecasts and scenarios help us prepare for a range of possible conditions. 

Our latest Winter Outlook, for example, tested 30,000 potential scenarios for each day of winter, exploring different combinations of weather, demand and generator availability. The aim isn't to predict exactly what will happen. It's to understand the risks and uncertainty well enough to prepare for them. 

Then there is the longer view.

Through the Strategic Spatial Energy Plan, we're looking decades ahead at how Great Britain's electricity and hydrogen generation and storage may need to develop between 2030 and 2050, and the broad areas where it could be located. 

We can't know precisely what the energy system will look like then. But we can understand the choices and trade-offs ahead and give decision-makers and investors a clearer strategic picture of what may be needed. 

These timescales are closely connected. The options available to engineers in the control room today depend on the system we have built over many years. Equally, the plans we make for the future need to reflect how that system will actually work in practice. 

For me, that's one of the most important lessons from more than three decades in engineering. Our job isn't to predict one version of the future perfectly. It's to understand uncertainty, test our assumptions and make decisions that leave us able to adapt as new information emerges. 

Whether you're looking five minutes or 25 years ahead, that principle doesn't really change. 

This National Engineering Day, we're being encouraged to look ahead to the engineers of 2076. We can't know exactly what system they will inherit, any more than I could have predicted today's energy system when I began my career. 

But many of the choices that shape their system will begin much sooner. We can give future engineers better information, sound infrastructure, flexible options and plans designed to adapt as the world around them changes. 

To me, that's what engineering is about: solving the problems in front of us while making sure we're ready for the ones still over the horizon.