The energy sector has a characteristic that few other sectors share: almost nothing can be realized without multiple parties agreeing at the same time. A wind farm, a grid reinforcement, a heat network — the decision never rests with one party. A local resident can bring a permit process to a halt, a grid operator can leave a project waiting years for capacity, and a province can make a spatial planning decision that has nothing to do with your project but does determine its outcome. The relationship between these parties is not that of customer and supplier, but of mutual dependency: you need them in order to build, they need you to make the transition happen.
That makes the question "who should you talk to" harder to answer than in sectors with a clearer hierarchy. There is no fixed order. The party that seems least influential today can be the party that delays a permit process tomorrow.
Anyone who lists the stakeholders in the energy sector sees roughly four categories, and it is the mixing of these categories that makes it difficult.
The first is the local resident or local community: people who have no formal role in decision-making, but who do dominate the conversation as soon as a project becomes visible. What exactly they expect is often not known before the conversation has taken place; there is a separate question on this point about what you actually want to know from local residents before you assume what they think.
The second category is the delivery chain: contractors, installers, grid operators. They are not spectators but co-executors, and their trust in your planning and your commitments determines whether a project is delivered on time. Anyone operating in this chain will recognize much of the dynamic also described in the question who should you talk to in the installation sector, where the same tension between planning and trust plays out.
The third category is the permitting authority and the regulator: municipality, province, national government, the grid operator as a public party. Their pace is not negotiable in the way a commercial relationship is.
The fourth category is less visible but no less important: the organization's own employee, especially the one who talks to local residents and contractors in the field and is therefore the first to hear what is going on. What that employee picks up is a separate source of information, elaborated in the question what you want to know from employees.
It is tempting to treat the energy sector as a variant of construction or real estate, because the projects overlap in form: there is digging, building, connecting. But the dependency on public infrastructure — the grid, the pipelines, the heat sources — makes the difference. In the real estate sector, the most important relationship is often the one with the buyer or the municipality, as described in the question who should you talk to in the real estate sector; in construction, the center of gravity lies more with the client and the chain of subcontractors, as described in who should you talk to in construction. In the energy sector, there is also a party that is not as dominant in either of the other two sectors: the grid operator, which does not negotiate but plans, and whose pace cannot be influenced by a good conversation alone.
The question "who should you talk to" is usually answered based on experience: last year's contacts, the parties that spoke loudest at the most recent project. That is a reasonable starting point, but it is not the same as knowing who matters now. Internally, there is often a fixed idea of which stakeholder is the most critical, and that idea is not always the same as what that stakeholder would say themselves. We do not measure that difference by assuming what a local resident or a regulator thinks — we do not know that until they say so themselves — but by placing the internal survey alongside the external one and looking at where the two pictures diverge. That difference, not the stakeholder conversation itself, is the first outcome of the Trust Baseline.
In a sector where projects take years, trust does not arise from one big event but from a series of small ones. A promised information evening that does not take place weighs more heavily against you than an investment you do not make, simply because the commitment was concrete and its non-occurrence visible. That is why, alongside the Trust Baseline, a commitment tracker exists: not to invent promises, but to see which ones have already been made and whether they have been kept.
This page describes who you are likely to deal with in the energy sector, not what those parties think of your project. The latter only emerges from the conversation itself, fed by a signal rhythm that keeps track of whether the picture is changing. The Trust Baseline, the tracker and that rhythm are under construction; anyone who wants to work with this can sign up for the waiting list.
Once you know who you should talk to, you often run into a follow-up question: who within your own organization has the time and capacity for that, and which part of the preparatory work — the research, the summarizing, the tracking of commitments — can be handed over to a system instead of to an employee's scarce hour. That question is answered by the work scan of FTE TO AI, which calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.