Ageing energy infrastructure undermines Europe’s energy transition resilience
Ed de Vroedt is Chief Operations Officer at OHROS Consulting Group, an energy consulting firm and host of the ITAMS learning programme. We sat down with Ed to discuss the programme’s key theme over the past twelve months – how ageing energy infrastructure is undermining Europe’s energy transition resilience.
It has now been one year since the Iberian blackout, a major power outage that affected Spain and Portugal and left over 50 million people without electricity. To this day, the incident continues to occupy energy experts. It has also been a major topic of discussion during the current cohort of ITAMS, an international learning and benchmarking initiative for transmission system operators (TSOs).
When asked how such an event could happen, Ed moves beyond the immediate cause and focuses on the broader structural issue behind it, one that goes beyond any single technical failure: a grid that has grown fundamentally more complex, and an asset portfolio that has not kept pace with that complexity.
“European TSOs have spent two decades optimising their capital expenditure (CAPEX) around capacity expansion and connecting renewables. Renewal has been a smaller story and so has the commissioning of the asset types the system now needs to stay stable.”
But, he stresses, that thinking “no longer holds”. TSOs are now approaching a tipping point: a large share of legacy assets is reaching end of life at the same moment that the grid requires not just renewal but a different kind of portfolio, one that includes assets capable of providing system stability services. “We are running into the limits of our own CAPEX logic,” he says. “With a meaningful share of assets ageing, that bias is now eroding the resilience of the system itself.”
“Europe’s grids are being asked to enable the energy transition while sitting on an ageing asset base that is not receiving enough attention.”
Resilience
Ed points to evidence emerging from the ITAMS benchmark. 83% of participants named resilience as their top challenge, ahead of all other themes, including the energy transition. At the same time, asset replacement typically accounts for around a third of total CAPEX, with the remainder allocated to expansion, renewable integration and network reinforcement.
Asked whether this split is simply the result of political and regulatory pressure to accelerate the energy transition, Ed is measured but firm. “That allocation made sense when grids were younger and operating them was simpler. It is harder to defend today.”
The gap that does not show up in condition ratings
One of the more striking patterns in the ITAMS data is that a significant share of transmission towers, conductors and transformers are at or near end of life, yet are still rated “Good” or “Fair” in condition assessments.
For planners, this creates a comfort zone that is difficult to challenge internally. “It gives teams cover to defer renewal, while the underlying risk profile continues to build,” Ed explains. “Resilience does not erode visibly. It erodes in the gap between condition ratings and actual exposure.”
What the Iberian blackout illustrated is that this gap extends beyond physical condition: a grid can appear healthy by conventional measures and still lack the operational tools, the right assets, in the right places, configured correctly to hold together when conditions deteriorate rapidly.
The incident sharpened this issue considerably. Grid resilience moved up board agendas across Europe in its aftermath, and regulators began reassessing how system reinforcement is funded.
The mood within the ITAMS peer group has shifted accordingly. Among participants of the OHROS Consulting Group programme, 92% now identify grid capacity as a barrier to the energy transition. 75% cite regulation and legislation, while 83% point to supply chain constraints from manufacturers and contractors as the most significant operational bottleneck.
Capital is beginning to respond, with average annual CAPEX expected to more than triple across the peer group by 2026-2027. But in Ed’s view, the influx of funding is only part of the equation. “The risk is that it is absorbed once again into expansion, without a deliberate focus on renewal and on the stability assets the system actually needs. More grid without better grid is not the answer.”
Data as the lever, not the headline
That question of decision quality runs directly into the next challenge. When the conversation turns to digitalisation, Ed challenges the way it is often framed. The technology stack, he argues, is not the real issue – getting the right information to the right people at the right time is.
He refers to one of the strongest findings from ITAMS. Across more than a decade of benchmarking data, every one-step increase in asset management maturity correlates with a 10% improvement in operational performance. Within the ITAMS framework, maturity reflects data quality, governance, planning discipline and decision-making capability.
“That finding reframes the digitalisation debate,” he says. “The question is not the technology stack. The question is whether organisations can make better decisions with the data they already have.”
The data quality picture across the peer group is sobering. Poor asset data quality is consistently identified as the number one barrier to value creation – weakening asset strategy, distorting risk assessments, driving inefficient capital allocation and complicating safety cases. In the context of resilience, the consequences are direct: if condition data cannot be trusted, neither can the investment decisions that flow from it.
“Without trustworthy data, digital investments do not improve decision quality,” Ed notes. "And without decision quality, resilience investment becomes guesswork.”
Best-practice organisations are therefore moving away from technology-led pilots. Instead, they are building purpose-designed data architectures, applying FAIR data principles for findability and reuse, and involving end users earlier in the design process. In the most advanced cases, conversational AI is beginning to replace static dashboards.
What separates the TSOs that succeed
Asked what distinguishes organisations that are actually translating this into performance, Ed highlights three factors: governance, people and regulatory engagement.
On governance, he notes that leading organisations embed data analysts, data quality managers, business analysts, application managers and system architects within the asset management function itself, rather than housing them in shared IT services. IT budgets are also increasing, with a growing share now allocated directly to asset management.
On people, he refers to a remark from a best-practice participant: “In the coming months and years, we will need to recruit new staff for data analytics and predictive maintenance projects.” His interpretation is direct: “Dashboards do not change decisions. People who trust the data do.”
On regulation, he is equally clear. Half of ITAMS participants cite the energy transition as a top challenge, while eight in ten identify resilience. The current regulatory framework was not designed for either. “Active engagement with regulators on cost allocation and resilience valuation is now a board-level responsibility. It is no longer a public affairs topic.”
ITAMS
This is precisely where ITAMS comes in. The programme helps TSOs make the shift required to build asset management resilience, including identifying the decisions needed to increase maturity and move from reactive maintenance to predictive and proactive strategies, underpinned by portfolio choices that are defensible to regulators, boards and the public.
“The programme combines benchmarking across TSOs globally with peer exchange and process excellence work, enabling asset owners to systematically increase their maturity.”
