Renewable energy projects represent a new frontier for project managers, providing a number of distinct opportunities for leading organizations.

With a variety of projects being undertaken across America, it has been forecasted that investment in the renewable energy industry of $42 billion each year will create 3 million jobs by 2025. Each project involves variables, points of consideration, and project timelines that are vastly different. Ensuring job creation within the sector continues to remain strong and profitable, a key priority for today’s industry and tomorrow’s economy. The success of these objectives rest in the hands of project managers and the tools they deploy.

As countries support the requirement of sustainable solutions to better manage climate change on their national agenda, delivering new renewable energy infrastructure on-budget, on-time, and of high standard is critical to the longevity of the environment.

New Technology Requires Micro-Management

Implementing new energy technology changes the game for project managers – bringing a new level of functionality and efficiency to a project.

Developing solutions that are effective under lab conditions does not account for successful project management capabilities during real-world application. It’s these differences that project managers need to understand and account for when running projects to ensure that renewable energy projects remain on schedule and completed on time.

While project managers continue to learn more about new technology and how to fully capitalize it, the solutions they employ also need to continue evolving. The heightened levels of technicality mean managers sometimes struggle to look at the bigger picture. With the assistance of solutions such as CURA™ Forecasting, project managers can look forward and spend less time on tedious reviews. CURA™ Forecasting enables organizations to view multiple projects and adjust these projects at the same time while visually analyzing the adjustments and how it impacts the project and program. The software also provides users with easy access to data at any time and location with the ability to manage many large-scale projects. As a result, project managers can micro-management, utilize time, and better manage and adjust projects on a monthly and annual basis.

As project managers look to capitalize on market opportunities in the renewable energy industry, employing solutions that incorporate flexibility, agility, and intuitive operability remains paramount to success.

New Types of Projects Commonly Break Budget

It’s no secret that new types of projects often go over budget compared to early estimates. Budget issues directly correlate with poor forecasting or a failure to account for variables that influence expenditure and punctuality.

While engineers can say that renewable energy project management is less complicated than their fossil fuel counterparts, professionals’ limited experience is really where complications start to set in. For this reason, a new set of expertise needs to be harnessed, managed, and understood in projects.

While a project manager may not be well-versed in the latest renewable technology, employing powerful project management solutions allow modern-day managers to control and derive efficiency in situations where they aren’t familiar.

Forecasts remain crucial for managing budget and time ahead of schedule, high-caliber forecasting like CURA™ Forecasting is necessary when managing projects outside of traditional expertise and to deliver accuracy on a month to month basis while staying on budget. Having a web-based platform to support forecasting and a standardize interface, enables utility organizations to process, track and eventually predict forecast consistently, with the right budget to manage projects.

Employing Key Learnings from the Past

A traditional approach to project management consists of a manager’s extensive knowledge portrayed through a management plan, with little explanation of details. While this method offers an efficient use of time and a centralized learning model, it hinders the ability for organizational learning, especially amongst up-and-coming project managers.

CURA™ Forecasting enables project managers to learn from previous data, projects, and knowledge, unifying millions of data points into one accurate forecast designed to deliver profitable projects. Previous project management software may have enabled managers to learn from past data using simple regression models, however, the new innovative capabilities of CURA™ Forecasting enable data to be thoroughly adjusted, monitored, and interpreted at any time and location. Instead of just outputting data, managers can utilize situational inputs and complex algorithms. CURA™ Forecasting takes advantage of key learnings from the past will provide managers with a holistic and in-depth analysis that is accurate and that can rolled into future projects.

Smarter Forecasting

Project managers, especially within the renewable energy industry, are under increasing pressure to meet the climate change deadline of 2050 under the UN Paris agreement. This pressure has meant project managers need to evolve at an increased rate and employ solutions that are more agile than their predecessors.

Basic forecasting models that use simple linear regression models could lead to stagnant industry growth. The renewable energy industry requires harnessing complex algorithms that allow the input of hundreds of variables, each with differing and varying weights.

Foresee Consulting’s sister software company, 4C Innovations’ CURA™ Forecasting solution empower America and the wider world to encapsulate its capabilities into renewable energy projects, ensuring the world’s health is protected for years to come. CURA™ Forecasting not only enables managers to increase forecast accuracy on a monthly and annual basis, but improves labor efficiencies, and has a purpose-built capability to identify and tract variances across forecasts for utility programs and projects. With the ability to determine variances, project managers can take this information to establish why there was a variance and how they can better manage resources and utilize or allocate the budget.

Renewable energy will soon replace traditional fuel counterparts as the world moves towards a new sustainable future. Incorporating traditional project management practices with new technology is core to the profitability of the renewable energy industry.

4C Innovations and its suite of software solutions along with Foresee Consulting’s consultation services empower energy companies to grow and succeed beyond their current situation.