11 Dilemmas

From the earliest stages of planning up to delivery, an average energy transition project takes at least ten years to complete, but then our infrastructure assets last a really long time. In the planning, we work together with parties who sometimes look ahead only a few years and whose planning horizon for developments and investments is much shorter than ours. This disparity is by far the biggest dilemma Gasunie faces, and there is no ready-made solution for this either. To address this, in developing our infrastructure we do not only look at specific customer demand: to determine our investments we also consider the II3050 future scenarios. By looking at which investments appear logical in all scenarios, we can make smart advance investments. For example, we are building parts of the infrastructure for Porthos on a larger scale than immediately necessary because we can also use those parts for Aramis and CO₂connect. We are also pleased with the grants for the Hynetwork Services and WarmtelinQ that partially cover what’s called the ‘slow uptake risk’, that’s to say the risk of the transmission volumes still needing to be built up in the first years of operation.

How do you stress the importance of security of supply when everything appears to be going well? The physical gas shortages everyone feared when the Ukraine war broke out did not materialise last winter (and not this winter so far either) due to a combination of mild weather and a drop in demand (be it involuntary or by choice) due to higher gas prices. As a result, we see public and political attention to security of supply going back down. At the same time, the risk of a physical gas shortage arising has by no means disappeared. The question is, what can we do about this? Given the great importance of security of supply, we will continue to provide the parties concerned in the sector with our insights, both on request and on our own initiative. We are a driving force behind new Dutch legislation to ensure security of supply for energy. And we will soon be publishing an annual vision paper, for which we are also consulting other market parties.

Like the rest of society, Gasunie’s transmission networks need to be carbon neutral by between 2040 and 2050. Accordingly, we will invest heavily in our own emission reduction measures over the coming decades. We apply an internal carbon price of € 200/tonne: that’s the amount we’re willing to spend to avoid a tonne of carbon emissions. This seems to conflict with keeping our energy transmission system affordable, which is one of our core values. All the same, we want to continue to apply this internal carbon price, representing our estimate of the social damage of one tonne of CO₂ emissions. We see that some of our emission reduction plans even cost more than € 200 per tonne of CO₂. These plans run the risk of being put on the back burner, meaning the emissions remain.

Safety is not open to negotiation at Gasunie: we aim for zero incidents in the workplace. All people who work for Gasunie must be able to return home safe and sound at the end of their day. Still, we see the number of workplace accidents increasing, with the total reportable incident rate or ‘TRIR’ figure – our accident KPI – exceeding the threshold value of 2.5 in both 2022 and 2023. And yet the matter of safety is not seen as a material topic by our stakeholders, in part because the financial impact of the accidents reported on Gasunie is relatively limited, and also because some of our stakeholders feel that a safe working environment should be a given. Accordingly, this annual report does not have an entire section dedicated to safety. Though it may appear that this topic receives less attention from the management than other topics, nothing is further from the truth. We will continue to do everything we can to achieve a TRIR of 2.5 or lower in the coming years. We are doing this, for example, by drawing up realistic project schedules and ensuring that there are no delays in the planning phase that result in having to make up the time in the construction phase.