How Big Things (Should) Get Done - Ep128: Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg

This week’s guest on Cleaning Up is Bent Flyvbjerg. Bent is Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford and is the most cited scholar in the world on the subject of megaprojects. Bent’s latest book, released this year, is How Big Things Get Done, on the science of successful project delivery.
Michael and Bent discussed the many, substantial implications of Bent’s research for the net-zero transition, including the stark fact that solar and wind projects sit at the top of the tree when it comes to arriving on time and on budget, with nuclear languishing at the very bottom.
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Links and Related Episodes
Bent’s latest book is How Big Things Get Done: www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo...
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Guest Bio
Bent is among the most cited scholars in the world on Project Management, Planning, Infrastructure and Cities. He has 30 years of experience as an adviser to government and business, including the US, UK, and Chinese governments and Fortune 500 companies. He has consulted on some of the largest projects in the world, from High-Speed 2 in the UK and the California High-Speed Rail project, each the largest civil construction project ever in their respective countries.
Bent is the author or editor of 10 books and more than 200 papers, translated into 20 languages, including Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition (2014) and this year’s How Big Things Get Done. He has received numerous honours and awards, among them a knighthood and two Fulbright scholarships. Bent is chairman of Oxford Global Projects, and was formerly the Academic Director of Oxford's MSc in Major Programme Management.

[@11jomjom]

Great conversation. Optimistic for solar, wind and batteries. But I am really much less optimistic for large transmission projects, which are badly needed.

[@Nikoo033]

13:26 root causes. Basically, the way our societies reward overconfidence, bullshitting and lying in decision making and in selecting project proposals is detrimental to the selection of other better projects with more realistic delivery and less sexy proposals. 😅 This issue has also been observed in hiring processes. Interviews and current selection systems tend to lead to the hiring of overconfident people, not necessarily correlating with their level of skills or intelligence.

[@constructioneerful]

Climate policies ought to have a risk register.

[@pinkelephants1421]

I'm not anti nuclear per se, but have to query the wisdom of going hell for leather down a path of the so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMR), that, at least in the UK, will be located in coastal areas. Since the increasing frequency & severity of climate change induced storms is well modelled & documented, I find it hard to see how its possible to engineer SMRs with sufficient resilience to withstand such climate change driven events without having some sort of Fukushima accident, particularly as these plants near the end of their lives after say, 50yrs, and we may find that coastal erosion & inundation is far worse than the models predicted; here is where the optimism bias discussed in the podcast fits in. Can you just imagine if my concern came to pass? The sheer cost and complexity of shutting down, dismantling and disposal would be astronomical and doesn't that doesn't even take into account the impact on the economy of a large scale energy shortfall should any country find itself in the position of having to do this at the multi plant level.

[@Nikoo033]

Another concern, as France has recently experienced, is that cooling systems for nuclear power plants don’t like the hot weather that we are experiencing more and more. Either not enough water in rivers, or not cold enough, and you can’t cool the reactors down and have to turn them down/off…

[@pinkelephants1421]

@@Nikoo033 Exactly. And this isn't just an issue France faces either. Just look how low the Danube and the Rhine rivers ran past year and in previous years.