Dilemmas and lessons learned

Every day, Alliander faces dilemmas that influence the way we plan and are able to carry out our work. Moreover, certain developments and events can have unforeseen consequences for our daily work. By being aware of these and learning from them, we continue to improve our organisation. In this chapter, we present a few of the main dilemmas and events we had to deal with in 2025.

Dilemmas

Modifying the energy grid to create more capacity: reducing safety margins to free up extra capacity or maintaining margins for maximum reliability?

Congestion on the network means that many businesses and households are waiting for a connection or upgrade. By carefully reducing the safety margins set in the system, we as network operators can free up more capacity in the short term. While this shortens the waiting list and prevents economic damage, it also increases the risk of faults, over-threshold peak values and potentially prolonged outages in both the short and medium term (depending on the location). A 1% reduction in reliability equates to approximately 3.6 days without electricity per year. And that is an average: in reality, the outages are not evenly distributed. Some users may therefore experience one or more prolonged outages (lasting longer than a week, for example), while others may notice little or no impact. Furthermore, neither society nor our troubleshooting team are equipped to deal with such prolonged and frequent interruptions; virtually all essential processes require a continuous supply of electricity.

Power outage situations of this type can be prevented if customers generate and consume energy flexibly. A flexible energy system enhances grid stability, prevents overload due to peak production or demand, and thereby reduces the risk of outages. Although the flexibility offer is increasing, it is still too small to have a noticeable effect. The alternative is to maintain the existing safety margins and keep the reliability of the electricity system at its current high level. The price we would have to pay for this is a long waiting list that just gets longer, further delays in customer investments and sustainability initiatives, and growing public frustration. The key question is whether we accept the uncertainty of (unpredictable) outages if we utilise capacity differently and accelerate the transition, or whether we opt for reliability and thus more delays in the medium term?

Do we standardise in order to help as many customers as possible, or respond as much as possible to specific customer requirements?

In order to facilitate growing energy demand, help as many customers as possible and reduce the waiting lists, maximum scaling up of processes and capacity is needed. This calls for standardisation: working with a fixed set of contract forms, standardised assets, recognisable customer propositions and framework agreements with market parties. Within the limits of customer needs, safety, affordability, legal frameworks and resilience, standardisation allows us to connect as many customers as possible and offer as much flexibility as possible.

At the same time, a scalable approach means that we lose the ability to offer customised solutions to customers who have diverse needs, contexts and development cycles. Customers often have an individual and unique energy challenge, specific growth ambitions or urgent business continuity concerns. However, customised solutions are also relatively expensive and labour-intensive.

So do we opt for standardisation in the short term in order to speed things up and ensure practical feasibility with the aim of helping as many customers as possible, even if this means that we cannot respond directly to all individual situations? Or do we focus on customised solutions for individual customers, so that we can serve them as well as possible in their situation, and simply accept the risk that speed and scalability may suffer?

What have we learned?

Working in a more customer-oriented manner

Our aim is to work in a customer-oriented manner and ensure that our customers and partners have easy access to information for making choices that match their needs and also fit within an affordable, reliable and sustainable energy system. However, we still see in practice that customers often do not fully understand what is involved, for example, when applying for a new connection or upgrading an existing connection, and what that requires in terms of implementation work and (advance) payments. All too often, customers are unpleasantly surprised in their dealings with us – they regularly find the tone of our letters and the time pressure they experience when making important decisions to be disagreeable. We need to think much more in terms of the customer's needs, their level of knowledge and their expectations. If we succeed in thoroughly understanding what is important to the customer and actively respond to this, trust and appreciation will grow, resulting in a more pleasant collaboration. That will also make us more successful.

Growth within limits

We have grown considerably in recent years, both in terms of the number of employees and in terms of investments. In 2020, we employed approximately 5,000 colleagues and invested around €900 million, mainly in our gas and electricity grids. Five years later, we have a workforce of nearly 11,000 colleagues and are investing more than €2 billion in our grids to meet the needs of our customers. So in recent years we focused strongly on growth, which was sorely needed because demand from our customers increased significantly. That demand, and by extension our work package, will inevitably continue to grow in the coming years. Nevertheless, we have noticed that we are nearing the limits of our growth. A higher intake does not necessarily make us more productive. So we need to do things differently and more intelligently to grow within the existing limits. It is important that new colleagues, or colleagues with a new job within Alliander, make the best possible use of their time, talent and energy. That is why we continue to devote management attention to onboarding, productivity and quality, which means taking a critical look at how we work and where we can be more efficient. Making more decisive choices and working with greater focus enables us to accelerate, finish and implement things. This is what benefits our employees and customers the most. Safety, customers and effective collaboration in customer value chains are priorities, to ensure that we achieve a sustainable result. Only through this combination can we continue to grow responsibly.