Power surge

The Irishman currently resides in Dubai and heads up ABB’s Middle East and Africa division.

It is a region that Duggan is clearly passionate about: he feels he is in the right place at the right time, able to join in the explosion of development in the Middle East and to take a leading role in the electrification of Africa.

“The Middle East and Africa accounts for 11% of ABB’s turnover. The percentage is growing and we want to see it grow even faster,” he enthuses. “Of course, the electrical industry worldwide has been growing dramatically in the last 2-3 years after a period of stagnation, particularly in western Europe and the US.

“There was a long period of no or low investment and that has eventually cut open all of the utilities so we see a number of brownouts happening and things like that, so there is a great need for upgrading the utilities.

That is one thing driving the current growth, but obviously China and India are growing dramatically too.

He attributes the stagnation in the western world to years of recession and also deregulation, which deterred utilities from investing in their assets.

“But we also see dramatic growth here in this region,” he continues. “People who don’t know the region think it is a bubble, but I don’t believe it is a bubble and ABB doesn’t believe it’s a bubble.

We think that this is sustainable growth that is going to continue for many years and we want to be a very big part of that: we are building up our resources and expanding to become an important player in this region.

ABB has clusters of manufacturing sites in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which focus on substations, automation and low-voltage switchgear. “Our key areas are power and automation technologies,” Duggan explains.

Power technology includes everything from the generating of power to actually making your light bulb come on.

And the automation side is not only for the transmission of power, but also for industrial processes and water; our work is a combination of bringing power to places and plant efficiency.

The Middle East with its rapid development is a vast and growing market place for ABB, but Duggan sees equal potential in Africa. “There are still a lot of political upheavals and tensions in Africa, but I see signs that Africa is beginning to wake up.

It holds commodities and there are not many places left in the world to be developed and there is a lot of money ready to go into that development.

I personally believe we will see an acceleration in the development of Africa,” he continues. “Will it reach the dizzy heights of India or China and the Middle East? Probably not in the next five years, but eventually it will.

“The Middle East and Africa region has a population of almost one billion; it is hard to get exact statistics but we have seen that the installed power generating capacity here is only equivalent to what is installed in Germany.

That in itself leads to tremendous opportunities for the future, so it is a question of timing, of when it is going to happen. We at ABB believe this is a dynamic region and one that will see growth and development over the next 10-20 years,” Duggan adds.

South Africa with its well publicised energy crisis is a market in itself, but we also see signs in Congo, Nigeria and west Africa – particularly driven by the oil and gas industry, and in east Africa around the minerals, coal and the copper belt: there is a huge diversity of reasons why places are growing.

Egypt has a big population that wants to develop too.

“Wherever there is development going on there is a market: we are in a primary sector which is infrastructure development and everybody needs electricity and water.

In Africa, there is more water available than in the Middle East so you don’t have to do the desalination, but the purification and cleaning of water is very important,” he notes.

Duggan says ABB prides itself on being prepared to task a risk and to be among the first to enter a new market such as Africa.

We are a company that will support clients in markets that are not always easy to work in and that puts a lot of demands on us in the compliance area and in terms of security to protect our people.

But from an engineering perspective as well as a moral perspective, someone needs to be first in there to help the infrastructure get set up.

This brings tremendous engineering and project management challenges, but we are a company that is prepared to go into all markets – not in a gungho manner, but in a structured way and in a risk-controlled way.

These markets always offer an opportunity. Maybe this goes back to our multinational culture – we see the whole world as the opportunity not as necessarily one country or areas of influence,” he comments.

“We go wherever the business is and go with customers wherever their business is; for us doing service and lifecycle support is absolutely critical. That is one of the areas we are focusing on in the Middle East: our service capabilities are a differentiator.

When you are available at 03:00 on a Friday morning and you can respond, that makes a big difference to customers in the long term.

Duggan believes the shift towards green technologies will play a key role in ensuring sustained growth in the power sector across all regions of the globe, including the Middle East, and ABB is already positioning itself to meet those needs.

“ABB’s contribution to a better world is that we want to drive sustainability in the sense of energy efficiency, so that everything we produce we do in a more efficient way and make it more sustainable.

For example, it is no good if a light bulb is energy efficient but the methodology of getting the electricity there is inefficient,” he says.

“So we are driving for lower losses in the transmission system; a more efficient distribution system; we are looking at district cooling and having a huge input in that area with efficient products.

Even when you look at communal air conditioning we put variable speed drives on them to reduce the energy consumed.

A lot of what we are looking at is energy consumption, in the way we produce our products and how we put systems together; the idea is to optimise everything.

ABB is also active in renewable energies, providing high-voltage direct current connections from offshore wind farms for example, as well as providing automation products for carbon capture projects.

But while Duggan will undoubtedly move on to pastures new, he says ABB is here to stay in the region: “We have a long-term view: we are here for the next 50 years and we are here to work with our customers on a long-term basis for the full lifecycle of the installations that they are putting in.

“We do not believe in jumping into a market and taking a big chunk and then going away for two or three years. Our concern is to help our customers and provide a service to ensure they get the most out of their assets.