What you should know
- We can all get bogged down in big projects; the more complex the project, the more challenges it presents.
- However, if a big project can be broken down into modular units, much like Lego pieces, then there is a good chance that it can be finished on time and on budget.
- This “Lego” approach, also known as “modularity,” is a concept embraced by Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor who studies why big projects often go horribly wrong.
- Flyvbjerg’s findings provide optimism about the transition to clean energy, he says, particularly when it comes to wind and solar power.
In the late 1980s, Denmark’s government announced plans for a massive bridge and tunnel project – the largest infrastructure plan in the history of a country that had little experience building tunnels.
Bent Flyvbjerg watched the announcement on the news with his father, who had worked in bridge and tunnel construction.
“Bad idea,” his father said. “If I were digging a hole that big, I would hire someone who had done it before.”
The Great Belt project, as it was called, would go on to face years of delays and the equivalent of billions of dollars in cost overruns. It provided inspiration for Flyvbjerg, who is now a professor of management at Oxford University, to spend much of his career studying why big projects often go horribly wrong.
This is one of the opening anecdotes in Flyvbjerg’s new book, “How Big Things Get Done,” written with journalist Dan Gardner. It’s a breezy summary of decades of research into big projects, with a lot to say about the transition to clean energy.
For instance, Flyvbjerg concluded that wind and solar are the kinds of technologies that tend to have predictable costs and finish on time.
The key is modularity, which means that a gigantic project is really a series of smaller parts that can be mass produced. Mass production leads to improvements over time, with opportunities to refine construction methods and reduce costs.
He uses the analogy of Lego, the construction toys, to explain modularity.
In short, if a big project can be broken down into modular units like Lego pieces, then a project manager has a decent chance of finishing on time and on budget. If not, then headaches are ahead.
“It turns out that humans are actually very bad at getting things right the first time. This is just not what we are made for,” Flyvbjerg said, speaking in a video call from Oxford. “Our sort of learning system is designed for trial and error.”
A database of 16,000 projects
Flyvbjerg’s project database includes just about every kind of power plant and related infrastructure.
He found that solar power projects were the leader – not just among energy projects, but all projects – in terms of avoiding cost overruns. Electricity transmission lines are second best, followed by wind power projects. Fossil fuel power plants also do well in terms of coming in close to their budgets, falling just behind wind power projects.
Meanwhile, he found that nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams are both prone to going wildly over budget.
Nuclear’s lack of modularity is one of the reasons that so many projects turn into financial disasters. Each nuclear plant is its own complicated thing, and because of safety concerns, everything needs to be close to perfect right away.
Hydropower suffers from some of the same problems as nuclear, with each project highly customized and a lack of modularity.
All of this is based on Flyvbjerg’s database of about 16,000 projects in 136 countries over several decades. He only includes projects that are complete, so current megaprojects, like the long overdue Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, are not yet part of the mix.
The nuclear industry is focusing on small modular reactors as the potential next generation of nuclear power, with several startups working to develop equipment that they say will be cheaper and safer than existing reactors.
But Flyvbjerg’s looks at the history of nuclear projects facing long delays and cost overruns and thinks it’s reasonable to expect more of the same, at least initially, for the first projects that use small modular reactors.
If that happens, then new plants wouldn’t be coming online until the 2030s, which means this technology wouldn’t be contributing at all during this crucial decade for making a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
Broader context
Flyvbjerg spends much of the book talking about some of the principles that underlie successful projects and unsuccessful ones.
One of the keys is the idea that organizations should be slow and careful with their planning, and then move quickly when they are putting those plans into action.
“Planning is a safe harbor. Delivery is venturing across the storm-tossed seas,” he writes.
When projects go bad, it’s often when the action phase gets bogged down in delays. Flyvbjerg calls this the “window of doom,” when unforeseen circumstances fly through the open window of a partially finished project.
He is not an energy scholar, and some of his conclusions are not going to be new to people familiar with energy industries.
What I find interesting is the way Flyvbjerg puts big energy projects in a broader context with other kinds of big projects, from highways to rollouts of new IT systems.
The upshot is that the energy transition is likely going to be financially workable. In a world prone to boondoggles, this isn’t one, at least not so far.
“We’re actually very lucky that the technology that we need in order to decarbonize is the least risky,” he said.
This article comes from our partner, Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer prize-winning nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment.
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