Energy Transition Strategy: How Product Thinking Applies to the Renewables Sector

There is a moment in every strategy project when the problem stops being abstract and becomes visceral. For me, it happened in an interview with a procurement manager at a Scottish offshore wind developer. I asked him what his biggest challenge was in sourcing renewables equipment. He paused, then said: “I can tell you the exact cost of a subsea cable connector for oil and gas. I cannot tell you the same for offshore wind, even though it is mechanically similar. The supply chain does not exist yet in the way we need it to.”

That gap — between demand that is structurally inevitable and supply infrastructure that has not yet materialised — became the central question of my MBA consulting project with Worley, and it taught me something I did not expect: product management frameworks apply to industrial strategy in ways that are surprisingly direct.

The Context: An Aberdeen Company at a Crossroads

Worley is an engineering and professional services company headquartered in Australia with a significant presence in Aberdeen — the historic capital of the UK’s oil and gas industry. Like many companies in the energy sector, Worley is navigating the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The strategic question they posed to our team was specific: how should they position their equipment supply capabilities in the UK renewables market, and what is the commercial model that makes that positioning viable?

This is fundamentally a product strategy question, even though it does not look like one on the surface. You have a company with existing capabilities (equipment procurement and supply chain management for oil and gas), a shifting market (the UK’s legally binding commitment to net zero by 2050), and a need to identify where their capabilities create value in a new context. Substitute “company” with “product” and “market” with “user segment,” and you have the same problem I have been solving for thirteen years.

Starting with Primary Research

The first thing I did — the first thing any product manager should do — was talk to the people closest to the problem. We conducted primary research interviews with nine procurement managers and supply chain leaders across the UK renewables sector: offshore wind developers, solar EPC contractors, hydrogen project managers, and equipment distributors.

Nine interviews may sound small, but in B2B industrial research, the sample is necessarily narrow. These are senior professionals with limited time and significant confidentiality constraints. The depth of each conversation compensated for the breadth. We used a semi-structured interview protocol — a core set of questions with the flexibility to follow threads that emerged naturally.

Three patterns emerged from the interviews that shaped the entire strategy.

Pattern 1: The Specification Gap. Renewables equipment standards are still maturing. Oil and gas has decades of API and ISO standards for every component. Offshore wind has some standards through IEC and DNV, but many components — particularly in emerging areas like floating wind and green hydrogen — lack standardised specifications. This creates friction for procurement teams: they cannot issue a standard RFQ because the standard does not exist yet.

Pattern 2: The Supplier Fragmentation Problem. Unlike oil and gas, where a handful of large OEMs dominate equipment supply, the renewables equipment market is fragmented across many smaller, often regional, suppliers. Procurement managers told us they were spending disproportionate time on supplier discovery and qualification — a problem that sounds remarkably like the supply-side challenge I faced when building Greenflip’s artisan marketplace. Different industry, same structural problem.

Pattern 3: Total Cost of Ownership Blind Spots. Most procurement decisions in renewables were being made on upfront cost rather than total cost of ownership. Maintenance cycles, component lifespan, decommissioning costs, and availability-based performance metrics were not systematically factored into purchasing decisions. This created an opportunity for a supplier who could reframe the conversation around lifecycle value rather than unit price.

Sizing the Market: The £1.275 Billion TAM

Market sizing is one of those skills that separates rigorous strategy from hand-waving. I have done market sizing in consumer contexts — estimating addressable markets for fantasy gaming platforms and D2C marketplaces. Industrial market sizing follows the same logic but requires different data sources and validation approaches.

We sized the UK renewables equipment TAM using a bottom-up methodology across three segments: offshore wind, onshore wind and solar, and emerging technologies (floating wind, green hydrogen, tidal).

For offshore wind, we started with the UK’s committed pipeline: the Crown Estate and Crown Estate Scotland have leased seabed for projects totalling approximately 50 GW of capacity through the late 2030s. Each GW of installed offshore wind capacity requires roughly £X million in equipment (turbines, foundations, substations, cables, and balance of plant). We validated these per-GW estimates against published project costs from ScotWind, AR5, and AR6 allocation rounds, and cross-referenced with equipment cost breakdowns from BEIS and the Offshore Wind Industry Council.

For onshore wind and solar, we used DESNZ capacity projections and applied equipment-to-capacity ratios derived from published EPC contract values.

For emerging technologies, we took a more conservative approach — using announced pilot and demonstration projects rather than speculative capacity targets.

The total came to £1.275 billion in addressable equipment supply opportunity across the UK renewables market over the next five to seven years. This is a TAM, not a serviceable addressable market — the share Worley could realistically capture depends on their competitive positioning, which is what the rest of the strategy addressed.

What made this sizing exercise credible was the triangulation. We validated our bottom-up estimate against top-down industry reports from Wood Mackenzie, BNEF, and the UK Offshore Wind Sector Deal targets. The numbers converged within a reasonable range, which gave us confidence that the market opportunity was real and quantifiable.

The Product Thinking Layer: Commercial Pricing Models

Here is where my product management background added the most value. The traditional approach to equipment supply in energy is transactional: you buy a piece of equipment, you own it, you maintain it. This works in oil and gas, where asset lifecycles are measured in decades and companies have the balance sheets to absorb large capital expenditures.

Renewables projects operate differently. Many are funded by infrastructure funds or project finance vehicles that prefer operational expenditure to capital expenditure. Developers want predictable cost profiles. And the pace of technology change in renewables means that equipment purchased today may be suboptimal in five years.

This context led us to propose two alternative commercial models, both inspired by patterns I had seen in tech and SaaS.

Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS). Instead of selling equipment outright, the supplier retains ownership and charges a monthly or annual service fee that covers the equipment, maintenance, and performance guarantees. This is essentially the SaaS model applied to industrial hardware. The customer gets a predictable OpEx cost and offloads maintenance risk. The supplier gets recurring revenue and a deeper customer relationship.

We modelled the unit economics of EaaS for three equipment categories and found that it was viable when the equipment had a service life of at least seven years, a maintenance cost that was predictable, and a residual value at end-of-contract that offset the financing cost. Subsea cable connectors and transformer components met these criteria. Turbine blades, with their higher variability in degradation rates, did not.

Pay-as-You-Go (Performance-Based). For equipment where performance can be metered — such as power conversion systems or monitoring instrumentation — we proposed a pricing model tied to output. The customer pays based on the energy generated or the uptime achieved, rather than a fixed fee. This aligns the supplier’s incentives with the customer’s outcomes, which is the same principle behind outcome-based pricing in software.

Both models required financial modelling that I would not have been able to do before my MBA. Understanding WACC, calculating IRR under different utilisation scenarios, and modelling the impact of residual value assumptions on pricing — these are capabilities I developed during my MBA programme, and they were directly applicable here.

B2B Go-to-Market Strategy

The final component of the strategy was a go-to-market plan. In consumer products, GTM is about user acquisition, conversion funnels, and retention loops. In B2B industrial markets, it is about relationship architecture, procurement cycle mapping, and trust-building at the institutional level.

Our GTM strategy for Worley had three pillars.

Pillar 1: Anchor Client Acquisition. We identified five to seven potential anchor clients — large developers with committed project pipelines and a demonstrated willingness to explore new procurement models. The strategy was to pilot the EaaS model with one or two anchor clients, generate case study evidence, and use that evidence to expand to the broader market. This is the same “land and expand” playbook that works in enterprise SaaS.

Pillar 2: Standards Leadership. Given the specification gap we identified in our research, we recommended that Worley invest in standards development — participating in industry working groups, contributing to the development of procurement specifications for emerging equipment categories, and positioning themselves as the company that defines the standards rather than just meeting them. In product terms, this is the equivalent of building the platform that others build on.

Pillar 3: Digital Procurement Platform. The supplier fragmentation problem suggested an opportunity for a digital layer — a curated platform where renewables developers could discover, qualify, and procure equipment from vetted suppliers with standardised specifications. This is, quite literally, a two-sided marketplace, and the dynamics I learned from building Greenflip — supply-first aggregation, trust architecture, quality gatekeeping — were directly applicable.

The Regulatory Dimension

One aspect of energy transition strategy that has no direct analogue in consumer product management is the regulatory environment. The UK renewables market is shaped by a dense web of policy instruments: the Contracts for Difference (CfD) allocation rounds that determine which projects get built and at what price, the British Energy Security Strategy that sets capacity targets, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US that is pulling investment across the Atlantic, and the EU’s Green Deal Industrial Plan that is doing the same in the other direction.

Understanding these policy dynamics is essential for market sizing and timing. A change in CfD strike prices directly affects project economics, which affects equipment budgets, which affects the TAM. A new local content requirement (like the ones being discussed for ScotWind projects) changes the competitive landscape for equipment suppliers. Regulatory analysis is not a nice-to-have in energy strategy — it is foundational.

This is where the MBA classroom and the consulting project intersected most productively. Our strategy module had covered PESTLE analysis and institutional theory. Our economics module had covered market design and regulatory economics. These frameworks, which I had initially found overly academic, turned out to be exactly the analytical tools I needed to make sense of a policy environment that was complex, dynamic, and consequential.

Outcomes and Reflections

We delivered the strategy to Worley’s senior leadership team in August 2025 and received a Distinction grade — 20 out of 22. More importantly, elements of the strategy are being considered for implementation, which is the outcome that matters.

But the deeper learning for me was about transferability. The core product management skills — user research, market sizing, value proposition design, pricing strategy, go-to-market planning — translate directly to industrial strategy. The vocabulary is different. The timescales are longer. The stakeholders are more conservative. But the underlying logic is the same: understand the problem from the user’s perspective, size the opportunity rigorously, design a value proposition that solves a real pain point, and build a commercial model that aligns incentives.

If you are a product manager curious about the energy transition, I would encourage you to explore it. The sector needs people who can think about markets, users, and business models with the same rigour that tech applies to consumer products. The problems are harder — you are dealing with physical infrastructure, regulatory complexity, and multi-decade investment horizons. But the impact is commensurate. Helping the UK’s energy supply chain transition from oil and gas to renewables is not just a commercial opportunity. It is one of the defining challenges of our generation.

And if the frameworks I have described here seem familiar, they should. Product thinking is not a domain-specific skill. It is a way of reasoning about markets, value, and human behaviour that applies wherever those things intersect. The energy transition just happens to be one of the most consequential intersections we have.