2020 has been exceptional in many ways. I was honored to present the keynote speech at the IET conference on Developments in Power Systems Protection in early March. It was the last conference I attended in person and probably one of the last physical conferences to occur anywhere in the world. As I was returning home, the world was shutting down, marking the start of a very different year for all of us.

While the pandemic restrictions impacted PSC, I am eternally grateful to our clients who worked hard to allow changes to the way we engage with them so that the worst of the impacts were short-lived. And of course I’m also grateful for our teams that did a fantastic job of living our values as we navigated through these unusual times!

We’ll always remember 2020 as the year of the global pandemic, but for PSC, there are many other positive highlights organized below by our five corporate values.

Share a common goal

I am pleased with the progress we made last year in sharing our perspectives on development in our industry. And I have appreciated our clients who have agreed to share their views with us. A couple of examples of this are Q&A discussions, one with our senior UK team members about the UK’s new 10 point plan toward net-zero, another being an interview with Essential Energy’s Head of Cybersecurity. We also participated with some of our key accounts at the UK’s Energy Networks Innovation Conference (ENIC) in November, marking our first virtual tradeshow.

Foster bright ideas

Last year was a year of helping many clients innovate. There are numerous examples of great things happening in our industry. We have helped our UK clients navigate new industry regulations, specifically helping Wheelabrator Technologies (WTI) with the design, construction and grid interconnection of new UK waste-to-energy facilities. We have supported a range of Western Power Distribution’s innovation efforts, including the development of virtual statcom and harmonic mitigation tools, among others. You can read about more of our client success stories here.

This year we formally launched our cybersecurity offering in Australia to build on the work we have already done in this area and acknowledge the increasing importance cybersecurity will have to our industry in the years to come. And we launched PSC’s first e-book on IIoT and the decentralized energy revolution.

Collaborate globally

PSC was founded in 1995 to provide HVDC services on the New Zealand inter-island HVDC link and we have been supporting clients with HVDC projects ever since. 2020 was a year of a significant increase in the work we are doing on HVDC systems in Europe where HVDC is the most prevalent. We also see dramatic increases in HVDC uptake around the world. We look forward to helping our clients with the skills and experience we are developing in HVDC, including a recent new hire bringing additional expertise and experience in HVDC/HVAC cables and HVDC interconnectors. And in 2020, I discovered what HVDC and coffee have in common!

Invest in the future

We kicked off 2020 with a significant change in our European business with the acquisition and integration of the Gridconnect team in Dublin and the transfer of our Newcastle, UK team from Ramboll. This more than doubled our team’s size in the region and brought new people into PSC with many new skills and a great set of experiences.

In October we welcomed two new General Managers to the PSC family in Asia-Pacific and the UK to strengthen our leadership and support our growth in those regions. We launched a new Energy Applications business unit in Asia-Pacific, which was a formal recognition of an evolution that had been happening for a while. I was thrilled to see two long-term PSC people step into bigger leadership roles, another excellent example of the team living our values.

Celebrate success

Australia and NZ earned ISO 9001:2015 re-certification last year, which confirms our ongoing commitment to quality. We use the same processes and systems across PSC to ensure high quality and predictable outcomes.

In 2020, we introduced our client satisfaction program, including measuring client satisfaction. We are happy to report our overall client satisfaction score of 5.3 out of 6 for overall satisfaction with more than 80 completed surveys. We are grateful for this valuable feedback and use it to focus our continual improvement efforts.

Supporting others in need

PSC is also committed to supporting others in need. Thanks to our clients’ and our teams’ support in navigating the challenges of working remotely, PSC has dealt with the obstacles presented by the pandemic without too much interruption to our business. I am grateful we’re in the position to support others in need through our charitable giving program.

Looking ahead

An exceptional year has ended and a new one is upon us. PSC has a renewed focus in 2021 to live our values every day and charge into the new year with optimism, and as always, with gratitude. Our thoughts are with all those who have suffered due to the Coronavirus. Our hope is that the imminent vaccinations are a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ as we progress into a brand-new year.