DNV GL ENERGY USES PALISADE @RISK TO MANAGE PROJECT INVESTMENT

DNV GL is the world’s largest ship and offshore classification society, the leading technical advisor to the global oil and gas industry and expert for the energy value chain that includes renewables and energy efficiency.  It is one of the top three certification bodies in the world.

The company provides classification and technical assurance along with software and independent expert advisory services to the maritime, oil and gas and energy industries.  It provides certification services to customers across a range of industries, operates in more than 100 countries and its 16,000 professionals are dedicated to helping customers ensure the world is safer, smarter and greener.  The company has revenues of €2.500 million.

DNV GL energy consists of 3000 energy experts that deliver world-renowned testing and game changing expertise for the energy value chain, including renewables and energy efficiency.  Since 1864, DNV GL has been dedicated to providing customers with services to safeguard life, property and the environment.

The company’s approach to managing project investment risks involves exploring and addressing underlying uncertainties in customer projects – by providing a thoroughly investigated and qualified basis for investment decisions throughout the lifecycle of a project.  Dealing with uncertainties is not only about minimizing negative impact, but also maximizing potential.  By using its own proven methodologies in combination with its domain expertise, DNV GL addresses critical issues in each project phase through a structured, systematic approach that ensures risks and opportunities are identified in time for critical decision making, enabling customers when required.

The company is a partner for the Norwegian Ministry of Finance for investment decisions for large projects (larger than 750 MNOK), as well as a preferred partner for the Norwegian Ministry of Defence in procurement projects.

Challenges
With unprecedented change in the energy industry across the globe, from growing energy demand and the globalisation of markets, to the expansion of renewables and an increased focus on sustainability, the ability to be nimble whilst managing risk and complexity is crucial in today’s climate in achieving success.

A recent example of challenges faced by this industry was DNV GL’s customer ROAF (Romerike avfallsforedling) an inter-municipal waste management company, with a primary customer base of 8 stakeholder municipalities.  In order to meet EU targets of 50% minimum recycling of domestic waste by 2020, ROAF wanted to invest in a new waste management system – it had several recommendations delivered by a supplier, but needed to ensure that the final decision fell on the most cost-effective and sustainable system – and guarantee that all risks had been considered along the way, as well as an independent quality assessment of recommendations.  DNV GL worked with the customer to create a solid foundation for decision making by using a well established methodology using aRISK to first understand and simplify assessment criteria, and then evaluate and report risks against these same criteria.

aRISK works by providing a range of probability distributions to represent uncertain variables, and then computing hundreds or thousands of different scenarios.  A probability distribution is simply a range of values with greater probability of certain values occurring than others.  The normal distribution, or “bell curve,” is a common example.  The values around the centre- or mean – of the distribution are more likely to occur than the values at the ends, or tails.

New risk management services with Palisade’s aRISK at its core
Uncertainty in project investment arises from a wide range of sources, and at different points in time during the project lifecycle.  If these uncertainties are ignored during decision-making, it can undermine a project before it even starts.  In the worst case, it can prevent organisations from achieving their business goals.  DNV GL’s latest risk management services helps secure its customers project performance by addressing risks from optimal conception to completion.

The company offers a wide range of risk management services, qualitative and quantitative in Project Risk Management, Enterprise Risk Management, SHE Risk Management and Operational Risk Management.  The company has aRISK at the core of its risk management services, Nicolaj Tidemand, Principal Specialist at DNV GL said, “The main reason we chose aRISK is that it adds that critical uncertainty that is present in all investments and decisions into the model.  This gives invaluable information to decision makers, with the integration into Microsoft Excel making the tool very flexible.”

He continued, “Risk management offers the customer more control over the risks related to the business and what actions can be taken to ensure a successful business outcome.  Quantitative investment risk analysis gives the customer more information about the risks related to their investment decision, the flexibility of Palisade’s aRISK supports simple cost risk models and complex quantitative risk analyses that could be tailored to the customer’s needs.”

Time series offers DNV GL insight into values that change over time
The latest version of aRISK introduced a new set of functions for simulating time series processes, or values that change over time.  Any future projection of time series values has inherent uncertainty, and aRISK lets users account for that uncertainty by looking at the whole range of possible time series projections within the model – particularly useful in financial modeling and portfolio simulation.  DNV GL finds time series a useful tool, it uses distribution fitting and time series when there is statistical background information to offer advanced sensitivity analysis.

The fundamentals of aRISK such as defining distributions, adding outputs, correlations and displaying results is at the centre of the work DNV GL does with its customers.

Other examples of projects where DNV GL has used Monte Carlo simulation

• Calculating cost of subsea HVDC cable analysing different routes, seabed topography and possible ships to install the cable.

Estimating availability of offshore power supply by conducting a performance forecast of a proposed offshore power grid concept.