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Summary
- Enexis, a leading Dutch energy grid Distribution Service Operator (DSO), faced growing congestion in the Dutch energy grid.
- Digitalisation, AI, and the success of decarbonisation efforts are driving much of the growing complexity in managing the energy infrastructure in The Netherlands. Besides this increasingly complex landscape, the Netherlands has some of the world’s strictest grid availability requirements in Europe.
- Enexis’ core challenge: integrate bottleneck analysis, solution design and investment prioritization across the three voltage networks.
- To solve this, Enexis partnered with Deloitte to define a vision, strategy, and roadmap for a Digital Twin capability, delivering the needed integrated grid insights to address network congestion and, at the same time, building the foundation for a future autonomous AI-powered system.
- Together, after defining the strategy and roadmap, Enexis and Deloitte kicked off the large scale transformation involving over 200 stakeholders from different disciplines within Enexis. Today the transformation has great momentum and is already delivering the first insights.
The situation
Enexis is responsible for the energy grid that millions of people and businesses in the Netherlands rely on every day. This involves managing multi-billion-euro investments each year to maintain and expand the infrastructure. To achieve the Netherland’s ambitious goals for decarbonisation and digitalisation, Enexis knew it needed to innovate drastically while reliably maintaining the core systems society depends on.
"Connecting everybody to the grid has increasingly become a challenge. Enexis, as leading Dutch grid operator, has taken on that challenge.”
- Thijs Derksen, Head of Net- and Capacity Management at Enexis
Enexis: Powering the future of the Dutch energy system
The challenge
The Netherlands is making rapid progress in sustainability and digitalisation. But, this same progress is overwhelming a grid that is designed for a different era with different energy needs. The huge success of countless solar panels, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and data centres, combined with industries switching from gas to electricity, is causing massive network congestions.
This is especially complex in the Netherlands, due to some of the strictest grid reliability requirements in Europe. While Enexis had excellent tools for managing parts of its network, it was missing a single, integrated view across the low-voltage (residential), mid-voltage (industrial), and high-voltage networks. Without this complete picture, it was difficult to pinpoint future bottlenecks and prioritise investments effectively. The company needed to shift how it made decisions about the grid.
"To address this, Enexis recognised the need to become markedly more data-driven. Deploying the foundation of AI to improve forecasting, capacity planning, connection handling, and operational decision-making while maintaining the reliability and resilience the system depends on.”
- Emil Kwaaitaal, Partner at Deloitte
It’s a complex balancing act: to innovate drastically while reliably maintaining the core infrastructure society depends on.
"Deloitte helped bring everything together under one vision and one data language, driving a transformation that involved more than 200 stakeholders across different departments.”
– Nicole Logister, Manager Change & Development at Enexis
"Together, we defined a vision, an integrated strategy across all key dimensions, and we formulated a roadmap to deliver integrated network insights.”
– Dario Raffaele, Director at Deloitte
The solution
The answer was to develop a Digital Twin capability: a live, virtual copy of Enexis’ electricity grid.
This Digital twin gives Enexis a complete, almost real-time view of its entire network. These integrated insights allows engineers and planners to identify bottlenecks, prioritise investments more effectively, and, ultimately, get capacity to customers faster.
Together, Enexis and Deloitte developed the vision, strategy, and roadmap for this complex transformation. We needed to crack the code on how to perform integrated network computations from an algorithmic, business process, and business transformation perspective.
The partnership combines Enexis’ deep technical knowledge of the grid and strong leadership, with Deloitte’s experience in large-scale AI and data transformations, change management, and thought leadership. What Enexis was missing, and what Deloitte brought, was to create an integrated view of the network status across all networks.
Enexis and Deloitte took a collaborative approach. Deloitte drove the initial phase, then transitioned to a joint delivery model, finally ending with the Enexis team taking full ownership with minimal support. With this approach, new capabilities are deeply embedded within the organisation for the long term.
The results so far? The transformation programme is successfully underway, meeting its ambitious milestones.
What's next?
The implementation of the key roadmap milestones will equip Enexis with the insights needed to make decisions that positively impact its investment policy, reduce customer waiting lists, and better manage the flow of energy across the grid.
On the technology side, the focus is on building a scalable platform that delivers central insights into grid capacity. Most importantly, this allows Enexis to maximise the usage of the Netherland’s electricity grid, connecting more customers to it. This gets Enexis one step closer to their mission of providing access to energy for everyone, at any time.
“We're almost a year into the transformation, and the momentum keeps building. We're seeing the next step in grid modernisation and data-driven operations.”
– Thijs Derksen, Head of Net- and Capacity Management at Enexis
