Dave Hallowell named to lead Black & Veatch’s global renewable energy business

The drive for decarbonization in the power industry, coupled with technology advancements making large-scale solar and wind power complemented by battery storage more cost competitive, continues to propel growth in the global renewable energy market. The world’s power providers understand the need to thoughtfully invest in ways to rapidly integrate renewable energy in the mix on the power grid. It’s against that challenging backdrop that Black & Veatch – a global leader in power generation and delivery solutions – announces its appointment of Dave Hallowell as the leader of its global renewable energy business line.

Hallowell’s 28 years of experience, including leading the company’s telecommunications public networks business for the past six years, position him well for the challenges that such fast-moving transformation presents. Hallowell has been a program and project director, construction and operations manager, and a design engineer for projects in telecom and power.

“As more utilities and developers rethink their power generation mix and adapt to the economic and environmental merits of renewables combined with energy storage, Dave’s experience adds to our depth of expertise in renewables,” said Mario Azar, President of Black & Veatch’s power business.

Wood Mackenzie predicts the U.S. will add more than 113 gigawatts (GW) of solar additions from 2020 through 2025, with about 75 percent of those additions coming in the utility-scale market. Similarly, Wood Mackenzie forecasts the global solar market will add 774 GW in 2020 thru 2025.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) expects that 41 GW of onshore wind will be added in the U.S. from 2021 to 2025, up 33 percent from 2019’s forecast for the same period.  Along with its U.S. outlook, BNEF also published its annual Southeast Asia renewables market outlook, with its 2020 forecast for capacity additions in coming years significantly higher than its 2019 forecast.  BNEF now predicts five countries in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) will add 22 GW of renewables from 2020-2023. 

According to Black & Veatch, utility Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) also increasingly are incorporating storage in their long-range capacity additions.

The company’s recently released 2020 Strategic Directions: Electric Report, based on expert analyses of results from a survey of more than 600 industry stakeholders, found that nearly half of the respondents said they they’re investing much more or somewhat more into local renewables at least in the short-term, outpacing capital spending on such things as distribution, transmission and other DER. Looking out over the next half decade, the push for renewables is more striking. Eight of 10 respondents forecast that more of their investments in new generation capacity will be directed at solar arrays on land, followed closely by energy storage (79 percent).