Energy & utilities / Selected work

Half of E-STATCOM cost sits in supply-constrained inputs — so secure it early, don't tender it late.

Fragmented market, supplier and spend information was rebuilt into one decision-ready view of the category. Decomposing cost and lead time into their real drivers showed why it rewards partnership and early commitment over aggressive competitive tendering.

At a glance ~50%

of installed cost in supply-constrained inputs

Engagement context

Consulting · large US investor-owned utility

My role

Category intelligence & executive briefing

Duration

8 weeks

Exhibit 1

Roughly half of installed cost rides on supply-constrained inputs

Share of installed E-STATCOM cost

So what

Price rides on inputs the supplier cannot fully control — an argument for locking contract length and production slots, not squeezing the quote.

Exhibit 2

Tendering late versus committing early

Sourcing posture compared

So what

In a strategic category — few qualified OEMs, long lead, grid-critical — positioning drives contract length as much as it drives price.

The commercial question

The utility was building a category-intelligence capability, and E-STATCOM — grid power electronics with integrated storage — was a priority. Supplier data, market intelligence, commodity trends and spend analytics all lived separately, with no structured view to support sourcing, capital planning and grid-stability investment.

My contribution

Built the category-intelligence report end to end on one framework — market structure, spend, supplier concentration, cost model, commodity exposure, lead time, contracting approach and KPIs — and iterated the executive summary until every statement was fact-based.

How I approached it

Use one decision framework

Structure the report around a fixed set of decision questions — market structure, concentration, cost drivers, lead times, contracting options, risk and supplier KPIs — so it stays comparable to the next category.
Decompose drivers, not aggregates

Break cost into its commodity and manufacturing inputs, and separate lead time into its critical-path components, rather than quoting a blended figure or an average.
Write for the commercial decision

Tie every risk to its procurement implication, and distil the result into a brief an executive can act on.

The decision that mattered

The shift that mattered was from describing a market to saying what procurement should do about it. An average lead time is not actionable, but a critical path running through power semiconductors and the coupling transformer points to a specific action: reserve production slots, do not simply order early.

What the work delivered

One intelligence base: market structure, supplier landscape, cost drivers and lead-time exposure in one comparable frame.
A differentiated posture: partner and commit early, with production slots secured ahead of need.
An executive-ready briefing that aligned procurement and engineering ahead of the sourcing decisions.

Sources: cost shares from published cost-structure and commodity sources (accessed September 2026) — semiconductor allocation into 2027, and copper above $14,000/t through 2026. This is decision-support intelligence, not a current market forecast, and it claims no subsequent sourcing savings or implementation outcomes. The client's own supplier panel, concentration and spend are withheld.

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