I moved to Glasgow, Scotland, six months ago from Florida in the US. It's very different and I’m adjusting to the climate, but I'm delighted to be here. There were multiple locations where I could have gone, but our regional headquarters for Black & Veatch are here in Glasgow. We have over 50 engineers right now, providing their skilled engineering and project management services to our clients in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Black & Veatch is unique in its set-up, out of our 12,000+ employee-owners we have a central pool of talented engineers, about 9,000 in total, who can be called on to work on projects around the globe. In that way we are borderless and focused on deploying skilled engineers where they are needed. Around the world we need more engineers, so the best way to use your global resources is to have them all in one pool: civil engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, geothermal engineers, chemical engineers. They provide support to all the areas and the solutions that we bring to our clients.

To take a step back and look at some of our current work, we're providing engineering design support for a major 300MW open-cycle gas project running on biofuels in Ireland. The plant, due to come online in 2027, replaces an oil-fired plant decommissioned in 2023. Elsewhere, for the past 14 years we've been helping the UK gas and electricity market regulator Ofgem understand consumer sentiment, through our detailed energy customer audits.

Our vision is to become the leader in sustainable infrastructure. What we mean by that is really building human-critical infrastructure that is going to power economies. We made a decision to discontinue working on new coal-powered power plants, we've moved away from that as part of demonstrating our commitment to be leaders in sustainable infrastructure.  

Our vision is to become the leader in sustainable infrastructure. What we mean by that is really building human-critical infrastructure that is going to power economies.

How can we achieve the goal of net zero?
Thinking about sustainability more broadly, if you look at the UK and the goal of achieving net zero, I am now asking myself, how can we help with that? The first thing that I noticed since moving here is that the time for BESS is now. If I look at the grid, I think of it as a patient. Can this patient take the stress that we're putting in? It's also 100 years old, like much of the infrastructure across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Our ageing grid needs urgent attention and upgrades so that it can take the extra loads we are generating from a world-leading renewable energy sector. The net zero goal here in the UK is a noble one, but I believe it can only be achieved through a rapid transformation of our grid and that’s what we at Black & Veatch are focused on.  

We're involved in over 3GWh of battery energy storage systems in this region. A key project is the Eccles BESS for Matrix Renewables in Scotland. This is a 500MW/1GWh project currently being built. Black & Veatch is the ‘owner's engineer’ – we like to build the things we design. When clients want to build complex energy infrastructure and they need a partner to provide additional advice and anticipate challenges on their behalf, we provide those owner’s engineer services to them because we know how the EPC world works.

We’re involved in the entire life cycle of our client’s infrastructure. Since we are the ones who most likely did the conceptual evaluation of their plans, identified the equipment that was needed and may have ended up building it, we can then provide excellent advisory work to ensure that management of the energy asset is being optimised.

We've also been supporting energy company SSE with the preliminary front-end engineering design (pre-FEED) and the FEED for the Aldbrough Hydrogen Pathfinder project, a 35MW electrolytic hydrogen project in east Yorkshire. Hydrogen is a new sustainable technology, so we need to foster it, and we need to actually show how it will be a vital part of the UK’s energy portfolio. We’re also working on one of the largest hydrogen projects in the world, an advanced clean energy storage green hydrogen project in Utah, US. This 220MW capacity renewable energy project (Black & Veatch served as EPC) is nearing start-up and commissioning.

I like to view bringing new technologies to the energy mix as a puzzle we’re trying to solve. How do we introduce innovation to the market that will increase the supply, resilience and reliability of energy? That’s the puzzle we are trying to solve.

I’m excited to be here in Glasgow to help solve the UK’s energy puzzle.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘Problem solving: how wind power uses a UK agency to resolve demanding engineering challenges’. Find out how an Innovate UK agency is helping connect big company problems with solutions that often come from small firms in other industrial sectors, to avoid reinventing the wheel.
• ‘From force majeure to restart: the engineering and project delivery priorities after disruption to LNG infrastructure’. What does it actually take to bring LNG infrastructure back safely, credibly and sustainably into service?