LiveDiligence partners with Wood to forge data-driven path in renewables

Bristol-based LiveDiligence is working with Wood, a global technical consultancy and leader in consulting and engineering for energy and materials markets, to enhance Wood’s data-driven advisory services and streamline renewable energy due diligence.

As one of the first technical consultancies to adopt LiveDiligence, a unique platform designed to deliver timely and actionable due diligence insights to renewables investors and lenders, Wood has helped its advisory team to expedite the processes that allow for clean energy projects to be financed and built.

Renewable energy technical and financial risks are rapidly evolving. To ascertain the viability of projects and support continued portfolio growth, capital providers need to familiarise themselves quickly with the complexity of emerging technologies such as storage, floating wind and green hydrogen, in conjunction with new financing and offtake structures.

This pace of market change and expansion is leading to an increased emphasis on robust risk management, alongside added scrutiny on the traditional mechanics of the due diligence process. In particular, reliance on time-consuming long form reports, and manual communication between key stakeholders are factors acknowledged to have resulted in long lag times between project conception and financing.

“At Wood, we’re leveraging digital technology and data management to improve our services and deliver greater benefits to our clients,” said Martin Tremblay, Offshore Wind Director at Wood.

“Effective due diligence is crucial for making well-informed investment decisions and for mitigating risks, supporting projects from their inception to operation,” added Tremblay. “Having grappled with traditional more fragmented approaches, we knew that establishing a single source of truth would be pivotal to a structured risk management process for our clients moving forward. To achieve this, we’ve partnered with LiveDiligence, using the platform to enable us to deliver valuable, real-time insights to our advisory clients, reducing time to close, and ultimately helping us play a leading role in an industry-wide shift.”

At the core of Wood’s digital transformation lies knowledge management. Effectively handling and organising data not just documents is a crucial part of ‘operationalising’ the experience within its advisory team – helping them to deliver value more efficiently and scale up to meet growing industry demand.

“Through its adoption of LiveDiligence, Wood is not only playing its part in speeding up project financing and deployment – but also creating a means to effectively manage its hard-won knowledge and experience,” said Craig Houston, Chief Product Officer, LiveDiligence.

“LiveDiligence aims to equip teams with the information and tools needed for coordinated working, ensuring consistency, and enabling effective decision making. This is particularly crucial for the Wood team, which has worked on many gigawatts of projects, each with their own unique complexities. By distilling their incredible industry knowledge and delivering it more efficiently, this wealth of experience becomes readily accessible to clients.  

Joss Boxford, Chief Operating Officer, LiveDiligence, added: “Wood recognises the value in faster communication with its clients and is taking the next step to streamline the due diligence process. We’ve been working closely with the Wood team for some time now as they explore the alignment of the platform with the needs of their renewable advisory team, and we’re excited to continue supporting Wood as they consistently improve the due diligence process.”