World Economic Forum: Smart Grid Research Projects

The World Economic Forum is a Geneva-based nonprofit foundation best known for its annual meetings, which bring together top business leaders, international political leaders, selected intellectuals and journalists to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world, including health and the environment. 

Besides meetings, the World Economic Forum produces a series of research reports and engages its members in sector-specific initiatives.

Over the past two years, the World Economic Forum has been delivering ground-breaking research to investigate and address the global challenges and opportunities to smart grid.

Accenture won a competitive bid with the World Economic Forum to act as the selected project advisory company to deliver the strategy and research, as well as support the marketing/knowledge sharing of the research produced on smart grids.

Accenture has also been a participant on the World Economic Forum’s Low Carbon Prosperity Task Force, a business-led, multi-stakeholder collaboration of more than 80 forum industry partners and 40 academic, non-governmental and public sector organizations. This group produced recommendations for the development of a low-carbon economy, which were presented to the UN General Assembly and COP-15.

In 2009, Accenture engaged a dozen industry leaders, including several major utilities, to develop a whitepaper entitled "Accelerating Smart Grid Investments."

The whitepaper was tested and shaped through interviews and meetings with the World Economic Forum’s advisory board and project task force members. Valued input was given from a range of major utilities and technology suppliers.

In 2010, Accenture was commissioned to build upon the 2009 paper commencing a second phase of smart grid research, developing a whitepaper entitled "Accelerating Successful Smart Grid Pilots."

For this paper, Accenture and the World Economic Forum engaged more than 60 industry experts from utility, energy, products and communications companies as well as government and non-governmental organizations in order to fully reflect the breadth of stakeholders and the complexity of issues surrounding pilot development. The research gathered a series of lessons learned and showcased a number of global case studies.

Accelerating Smart Grid Investments
This piece of thought leadership was published by the World Economic Forum and Accenture in July 2009. The paper forms the foundation for a global platform of exchange between policy, regulators and the private sector to help discuss and devise workable frameworks and incentives.

The paper’s content has been presented at a range of World Economic Forum meetings including the annual meeting at Davos. The paper’s excellent response from the industry led Accenture to be invited to support World Economic Forum’s Climate Change Initiative. This taskforce submitted recommendations to advise G20 leaders.

Accelerating Successful Smart Grid Pilots
This paper was published by the World Economic Forum and Accenture in September 2010 at the Summer Davos in Asia. It has been translated into Chinese, Japanese and English. The findings were presented at Davos 2011.

Based on industry lessons learned, the 40-page report is an in-depth summary of the critical success factors for pilots across the pilot life cycle. It also makes a series of recommendations to industry stakeholders.

The report has so far been featured in more than 74 press articles globally.