Uniper : Digitalizing our operational fleet

Exactly one year ago this week, I accepted a new challenge - to lead the digitalization of our operational fleets as EVP Digital Evolution in the Chief Operations Officer area (COO) covering roughly 35GW of generation and storage assets with a working gas capacity of around 8 billion cubic meters. Excited by the opportunity, I remember thinking that my background in engineering, asset management and strategy execution would serve me well in shaping the digital future of our operational business. Infact, the most important skills I needed was change management and how best to engage our people - but I'll come to that later.

One year on I'd like to share my experience with you, the challenges I have faced along with our fleet of 28 power plants, 10 energy storage facilities, 4500 operational colleagues and our central management teams, and how we've come to develop our digital roadmap.

Our first challenge: If we don't know the final destination - how can we plot the journey?

Our fleet portfolio of hydro, gas, steam and biomass, and storage assets are responding to rapid change. The way we will generate, store and trade energy will be very different in just a few years. The future of our operations requires new ideas, new thinking, new digital ways of working and a new set of digital skills. For us to stay relevant we need to be competitive, across all our operational plants in Germany, UK, Netherlands, Sweden and Hungary. Increased competitiveness will enable us to fund growth and the investment needed in our energy evolution. We are planning to invest until end of 2023 2.7 billion Euros into the transformation of our portfolio (excluding major take overs).

With our European generation business, we are committed to delivering net zero by 2035. But how our portfolio will look in the years ahead is not fixed - so we need to be agile in our approach. This applies not only to the optimization of our current generation technologies, but even more importantly to lay the foundation for the future assets that will transform our portfolio and dominate the energy industry very soon. We must have the agility to adapt and use new innovations and digital solutions in different technologies from the ones we are running today. We are convinced that digital is the next step change in performance for the energy sector and with our digitalization initiative in the COO area our ambition is to become a leader in digital technology in our sector. We believe that data and the way we manage and use it will become one of Uniper's key differentiators.

Challenge#2: How do you set expectations of a digitalization program when the technology is moving so fast?

We set ourselves program framework objectives rather than specific technology goals. In fact, our aim is that the solutions that are chosen for wider take up are technology agnostic - so that they can be picked up and applied across our whole current and future portfolio regardless of technology type.

Our vision for the three-year program is to:

- Secure and strengthen our foundation

Uniper's launch gave us the opportunity to completely modernize our IT landscape and Damian (our CIO) and his team made an excellent job of giving us a very modern, cloud only infrastructure. So, we are building on a great foundation and can focus on developing new and agile ways of working to connect, simplify and automate operational activities across our portfolio. We strive for "one touch" automated workflows for process execution by connecting systems rather than building new complex ones.

- Tailor solutions to our business

We don't look for the latest APP or gadget - we look for problems and the best ideas from our operational teams. Our focus is on driving value and improving the way we work and do business. Only if we tailor each solution to the day-to-day needs of our colleagues do we create the necessary acceptance and motivation to use them. Digital tools can have no impact without our people using them

- Enable net zero

Our energy evolution can only be delivered with the success of digitalization.

- Increase our competitiveness

Competition in the energy industry is intensifying through data- and technology-driven approaches. The energy sector is becoming more volatile, more decentralized and decarbonized. Rapidly developing (IT) technology and smart use of data, will help us to make better decisions, understand market developments before our competitors, and increase the efficiency of our internal processes- crucial elements for our success in such a rapidly changing environment.

- Support HSSE ambitions

"Beyond zero" is our Uniper COO 2025 HSSE Vision and digitalization offers great opportunities to further improve our HSSE performance. For example, by limiting human interaction in potentially dangerous environments, ensuring maintenance compliance and sharing lessons learned.

- Empower our people and grow digital capabilities

Digitalization is a cornerstone for building the future energy system, but it is our people who will play the most important role. Therefore, we are targeting a sustainable digital future by focusing on our people, listening to their ideas, encouraging their creativity, creating engagement, driving ownership and helping them to grow strategic digital capabilities.

Challenge #3: How do you initiate a digital change programme across 5 countries, 38 diversified assets and engage over 4500 people - without chaos?

We've approached this in two ways - building on the experience and professionalism of our Operational Excellence teams - and aligning our programme to ISO 55001.

Since 2012 our Operational Excellence teams have been establishing a culture to help Uniper work as efficiently as possible, removing waste and inefficiencies - combining operational processes, management systems, mindset and behaviour. With this established, we've been able to work in partnership with them to see how we use digital innovations to:

• deliver value to our internal and external customers
• solve problems and optimize established processes
• champion how we can use data to optimize complex and large volume processes.

Secondly, by aligning the program framework to ISO 55001, which is the international asset management standard that all our operational plants follow, we're enabling our people to identify digital solutions for their plant problems using the professional approach they take in their day-to-day job.