Construction Industry Transformation Map.

Grid Resilience and Renewables:.Recent power outages in Spain and Portugal highlight the critical issue of grid inertia, a challenge exacerbated by the increasing integration of renewables like solar and wind power, which lack the 'spinning' stored energy of traditional turbines.

Surging Energy Demand:.New technologies, particularly AI data centres and the electrification of transport (e.g., electric cars), are driving unprecedented increases in demand for reliable power, putting significant strain on existing infrastructure.The Importance of 'Network Value':.

The discussion emphasises the need to evaluate energy sources based on their 'network value' - factors like reliability, ability to ramp up/down to demand, and flexibility - rather than just their absolute cost per unit of energy.Distributed vs. Centralised Power Debate:.

There's an ongoing debate about the optimal balance between large, centralised energy systems (like national grids and large nuclear plants) and more distributed, localised power generation and storage (such as car batteries or smaller modular reactors).

Need for Sophisticated Energy Debate:.She cautions that we don’t want a level of standardisation where there isn’t space for innovation, or which “precludes fabrication.”.

These things really depend on who makes the standards, she says, what they are thinking of enabling in the future, and what their understanding of the future looks like.Not all policymakers are thinking about industrialised construction, prefabrication, or DfMA.

They may be looking at things in terms of one particular market application, but not in terms of others.So, standardisation doesn’t necessarily help us on its own, but it does have a shot of helping us if someone informs it in the right way.. She also points out that, although we could easily fight forever about industrialised construction terminology, the important thing is that the core concepts remain true.