──── ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE · PLANNING & DEVELOPMENT
Why Build-to-Operate Is Replacing Traditional Planning
By David Swank, CEO, i3 Power & Energy
For decades, the conventional model for energy infrastructure followed a familiar sequence: plan comprehensively, permit extensively, build, and then hand off operations to a separate team. The assumption was that rigorous upfront design would produce a facility that ran predictably. That assumption no longer holds.
The energy landscape has changed too fast. Grid interconnection timelines have lengthened dramatically. Load profiles have shifted from relatively stable industrial and residential demand to the volatile, high-density consumption patterns of data centers, EV charging networks, and electrified industrial processes. Regulatory environments have grown more complex. The cost of being wrong, of planning for a world that no longer exists by the time a project comes online, has become severe.
The Failure of the Handoff Model
The traditional build-then-operate model creates a fundamental discontinuity. The team that designs a facility optimizes for construction cost and regulatory approval. The team that operates it inherits consequences they never fully anticipated: dispatch constraints, maintenance cycles, interconnection realities that looked different on paper. I saw this firsthand during my years running a major utility. We would commission an asset and discover almost immediately that the operational assumptions baked into the original engineering were already outdated. The grid had changed. Customer demand had shifted. The facility we built was not quite the facility we needed.
The technology sector confronted an analogous problem years earlier. Software companies that separated development from operations produced products that worked beautifully in staging environments and fell apart in the field. The DevOps movement emerged precisely because the handoff model could not keep pace with the speed at which systems were changing. Energy infrastructure is arriving at the same inflection point.
“The question is no longer how do we build the right facility. It is how do we continuously operate the right facility as conditions change around it.”
What Build-to-Operate Actually Means
Build-to-operate is not simply a rebranding of integrated project delivery. It represents a genuine shift in how infrastructure is conceived. The operating team is not a downstream customer of the construction process. It is an author of it. Operational requirements, grid interconnection realities, dispatch economics, and long-term maintenance constraints are embedded into design decisions from the first day of planning, not appended as afterthoughts.
At i3 Power & Energy, we begin every project with a detailed operating model before a single engineering drawing is finalized. What will dispatch look like in year three? What are the interconnection constraints we will be managing in year seven? How does the asset perform in peak demand scenarios that did not exist when the project was conceived? These are not hypothetical questions. They drive real decisions about equipment selection, site configuration, and control architecture.
Continuous Optimization as a Design Principle
One of the most significant advantages of the build-to-operate model is that it treats optimization as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time exercise. Traditional planning tends toward a set-and-forget posture, where a facility is designed, built, and then managed against the original design intent. Build-to-operate assumes from the outset that the asset will need to evolve, and designs the organizational and technical systems to support that evolution.
This matters enormously right now. Grid operators are changing market rules. Interconnection queues are reshuffling. The economics of storage, flexible load, and dispatchable generation are shifting on timescales that no ten-year plan can fully anticipate. An infrastructure platform designed to be operated, rather than merely run, can adapt. One designed purely for construction cannot.
The Capital Case for Operating-First Thinking
There is a pragmatic financial argument for this approach that often gets lost in the operational narrative. Assets designed with operating economics at the center tend to perform better across the full capital cycle. They require fewer costly retrofits. They achieve higher availability. They generate more favorable dispatch profiles. And critically, they become bankable projects. For investors and project finance lenders, the difference between a facility optimized for construction cost and one optimized for operating performance can represent hundreds of millions of dollars in lifetime value.
This is not an argument against cost discipline in construction. It is an argument that construction cost is the wrong primary optimization target. The right target is the lifetime cost of energy delivered, and that calculation is won or lost in operations, not in the original engineering specification.
The infrastructure projects being built today will be operating in 2040 and beyond. The grid those assets will operate on looks very different from the grid we are designing for today. Build-to-operate is how we close that gap, not by predicting the future, but by building the organizational and technical capacity to respond to it.