Insights & Intelligence

Most overruns are decided before construction starts.

Six controls the Sponsor owns, regardless of what the contract says.

Bent Flyvbjerg's database is the largest of its kind — more than 16,000 projects across 136 countries. Measured against their own approved budgets and schedules, 47.9 per cent finished on budget. 8.5 per cent finished on budget and on time. 0.5 per cent finished on budget, on time, and with the benefits promised.

That is not a construction problem. It is a governance problem, and most of it is settled before a contractor mobilises. The contracting model is typically chosen in a fortnight and then governs the risk outcome for years. Pre-construction is the least expensive phase of the project and the phase in which the largest sums are committed. Neither decision is recoverable once the works begin.

This commentary sets out six controls that remain with the Sponsor in every delivery model, turnkey included. Each is lost quietly, long before it shows up in a report.

■ Delivery strategy — fixed before the market is approached, not after
■ Pre-construction certainty — bought while it is still cheap to buy
■ Sponsor capability — turnkey transfers work, not accountability
■ Interfaces — the space between contracts, owned deliberately
■ Early resolution — issues settled before they harden into claims
■ Continuous assurance — knowing whether the reported position is true

Each control is set out with the specific disciplines it requires, an example critical interface register, and the point at which Sponsor influence over cost and programme begins to decline.

A contract manages what sits inside it. Someone has to manage what does not.

‍To read the summary commentary download the pdf.

Why Renewable Energy Projects Stall Before Financial Close - Commentary

Lenders are not troubled by risk. They price risk every day. They are troubled by uncertainty, because uncertainty cannot be priced - and what cannot be priced gets deferred to the next credit committee.

Every project allocates risk. Not every allocation is financeable. The test is not whether the allocation is fair — it is whether a credit committee will accept it without demanding a mitigant the project cannot afford.

A project is not one contract. It is many, executed at different times by different advisers under different pressures. No single agreement fails a financing. They fail against each other.

Conditions precedent do not cause delay. Discovering them late does. On most projects the CP schedule is drafted at term sheet, filed, and opened again eight weeks before the target close.

Financial Close is an integration exercise conducted under deadline by parties with different incentives. It needs one person whose entire job is to hold the whole picture. On stalled projects, that person usually does not exist.

At the start, every party wants Financial Close. By month four they want different versions of it. The divergence is normal and predictable. Leaving it unmanaged is neither.

Financial Close is the moment the market audits four years of development decisions. Projects that close efficiently do so because the work was done — not because the negotiation went well.

Financial Close requires five forms of readiness - Technical, Commercial, Regulatory, Financial and Organizational.

Download the pdf to read the full carousel.

Reassessing EPC Wrap, Turnkey Lump Sum and Multi-Contracting in Asia-Pacific Renewable Energy Markets - a commentary

For decades, renewable energy projects across Asia-Pacific have relied on EPC wrap and turnkey contracts as the preferred path to certainty, bankability and risk transfer.

Yet as projects become larger, more technologically sophisticated and increasingly dependent on transmission networks, OEMs, regulators and multiple specialist contractors, the nature of project risk has fundamentally changed.

This article examines EPC wrap, turnkey lump sum and multi-contracting through a practical lens.

‍To read the summary commentary download the pdf.

Distressed Project Advisory, the Anatomy of Project Stress, and What Recovery Actually Requires.

Nearly every complex infrastructure and renewable energy project that enters into distress and eventually ends in formal dispute passed through a period, typically twelve to twenty-four months long, when it was still recoverable. The programme was in distress but not yet in default. The commercial positions had hardened but the formal claim had not been submitted. The lender was beginning to ask questions but had not yet triggered the cure period. This commentary examines that window: what it looks like, how long it stays open, what closes it, and what is required to act within it before it closes.

The author’s view, based on more than three decades of infrastructure project delivery across Asia-Pacific, is that this pattern is not confined to poorly managed projects. The most instructive feature of major infrastructure distress is its prevalence on projects staffed by competent, experienced professionals operating within governance frameworks that were adequate at financial close but progressively inadequate as delivery challenges accumulated. The difference between a project that recovers and one that proceeds to formal dispute is rarely a function of the technical competence available to the project. It is a function of when, and by whom, the honest assessment of the project's trajectory is surfaced to the governance framework that has the authority to act on it.

The thesis of this commentary is straightforward: a project that appears to be performing satisfactorily may in fact be a stressed project awaiting discovery, and generally projects come undone by the compound effect of a series of mostly known risks.^[1] Good starts do not guarantee good projects, because infrastructure and energy projects are extended in duration, compound in complexity over time, and are delivered by people who become tired, institutionally captured, and progressively less willing to provide the honest governance that the project's increasing stress demands. Many distressed projects remain recoverable, but the method of recovery is as important as the decision to attempt it. And the single most expensive outcome, formal dispute and arbitration, can often be avoided if the intervention occurs early enough and is conducted by practitioners with the relevant direct experience to change the project's trajectory rather than merely document its decline.

[1] Flyvbjerg, B., & Gardner, D. (2023). How big things get done: The surprising factors that determine the fate of every project, from home renovations to space exploration. Currency. p. 115.

‍To read the short-form commentary download the pdf.

Under revision to include IEA's Electricity 2026 - Analysis and forecast to 2030.

Why grid infrastructure is becoming the defining capital-allocation and bankability risk of the next decade.

Across the Asia-Pacific, renewable generation can now be financed, procured, and built faster than electricity networks can absorb, dispatch, and transport its output. The binding constraint on the next phase of the energy transition has migrated from the generation to the transmission systems, and more precisely, from engineering to institutions.

For most of the past decade, the Asia-Pacific energy conversation has been a conversation about generation. Governments announced gigawatt-scale renewable targets, investors competed to deploy capital, developers assembled pipelines and renewable energy deployment records tumbled. The cost of renewable energy technology continued to fall to the point where, across most major markets in the region, new wind and solar has become the cheapest available source of commercial scale electricity. The uncomfortable consequence and the reality that the renewable energy industry faces is that a binding constraint on the energy transition has not disappeared. It has moved.

The constraint now sits in the transmission systems and grid networks. Renewable generation across the Asia-Pacific region is increasingly being commissioned faster than transmission systems can absorb, dispatch, and transport it, and the symptoms are no longer marginal. Connection queues can be measured in years, curtailment measured in tens of percent, deferred commercial operations, and in some cases risks of stranded investment assets.

This commentary advances a deliberately narrower and more demanding proposition than the familiar observation that transmission “matters”. The timing mismatch is substantial: the IEA estimates that planning, permitting and completing new grid infrastructure can take five to fifteen years, compared with approximately one to five years for new wind and solar facilities, one to three years for data centres and one to two years for EV-charging infrastructure.^[1] Sophisticated industry participants already accept this reality.

The proposition is this: the Asia-Pacific energy transition is now constrained less by generation technology, capital availability, developer competition, workforce capacity and resource quality than by the capacity of institutions, utilities, and regulatory frameworks to deliver network infrastructure at a pace consistent with renewable energy deployment ambition.

The scale of the coming system requirement reinforces this diagnosis. The IEA forecasts Asia-Pacific electricity demand to grow by an average of approximately 4.7% annually between 2026 and 2030, with the region accounting for 56% of global electricity use by 2030, up from 53% in 2025. Solar PV and wind are expected to meet approximately 86% of the region’s additional electricity demand over the forecast period.^[2] The resulting task is therefore not simply to connect more generation, but to operate a substantially larger and more variable electricity system.

The deficit is real, but it is downstream of a governance problem. It determines where the risk sits, who carries it, and how it is priced.

The answers will of course vary by market. The discipline of asking them should not. The wire problem is no longer somebody else’s problem to acknowledge in a risk register and then ignore. It is the problem.

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^[1] International Energy Agency. (2026). p. 129.

^[2] International Energy Agency. (2026). p. 46.

To read the long-form cited and referenced commentary download the pdf.

Reassessing EPC Wrap, Turnkey Lump Sum and Multi-Contracting in Asia-Pacific Renewable Energy Markets.

Project success in Asia-Pacific’s energy transition is determined less by contractual form than by the capability, governance and experience available to support it. Every delivery model has a legitimate purpose; what differs is the risk profile and the organisational capability required to manage it.

For decades, renewable energy projects across Asia-Pacific have relied on EPC wrap and turnkey contracts as the preferred path to certainty, bankability and risk transfer.

Yet as projects become larger, more technologically sophisticated and increasingly dependent on transmission networks, OEMs, regulators and multiple specialist contractors, the nature of project risk has fundamentally changed.

This commentary argues that today’s renewable energy projects are no longer defined by construction risk - they are defined by integration risk. The question is no longer which procurement model is “best”, but whether the owner, contractor and project team possess the capability, governance and experience required to manage increasingly complex interfaces.

Drawing on more than three decades of project delivery across Asia-Pacific, together with international research, industry data and regional case studies, this article examines EPC wrap, turnkey lump sum and multi-contracting through a practical lens. It concludes that project success is determined less by contractual form than by organisational capability, institutional maturity and disciplined governance—an insight that is becoming increasingly important for developers, lenders, contractors, investors and dispute practitioners throughout the region.

To read the full long-form, cited and referenced commentary download the pdf.

Distressed Project Advisory, the Anatomy of Project Stress, and What Recovery Actually Requires.

Nearly every complex infrastructure and renewable energy project that enters into distress and eventually ends in formal dispute passed through a period, typically twelve to twenty-four months long, when it was still recoverable.

The programme was in distress but not yet in default.

The commercial positions had hardened but the formal claim had not been submitted.

The lender was beginning to ask questions but had not yet triggered the cure period.

This commentary examines that window: what it looks like, how long it stays open, what closes it, and what is required to act within it before it closes.

To read the long-form, cited, referenced commentary download the pdf.