In April 2024, the European Sea Ports Organisation (ESPO) launched the results of a study on the investment pipeline and investment challenges of European ports.
The report concludes that port management bodies in the EU collectively forsee an investment pipeline of about 80 billion in the next 10 years, and yields a couple of interesting additional insights that merit some more reflection. The central one in this contribution is the potential role of the port development company (PDC) in energy management. Around 30% of all the ports that provided data intend to invest in developing such services.
Energy management services can for instance allow the optimisation of the use of available electricity grid capacity for various companies, or even the whole ‘port business ecosystem’ together. Such services can also enable companies to exchange any surplus of self-generated electricity or create value for port companies by joint facilities to store electricity when prices are low and use these when prices are higher.
In my view, the logic for the PDC as provider of such services is compelling: these services help improve the collective efficiency of all the companies that operate in the port. At the same time, commercial companies may not be too eager to develop these services (with the associated investments) because of an unattractive risk/return profile and because such energy services can only be developed in an often costly and lengthy process to secure buy-in of the companies in the port that stand to benefit from these services.
All in all, these characteristics make energy management (in my vocabulary) a ‘port business ecosystem service’ in the same way a port community system is a port business ecosystem service. The PDC in my view should be eager to develop these ‘ecosystem services’, primarily because they create value for the companies in the port and this helps to attract new investments, which in turn generate financial return for the PDC. The road to the successful introduction of such services requires intrapreneurship, experiments and commitment. But value for port users and society at large awaits at the end of the road!
