ABB boss Guggisberg talks switchgear and sustainability

The President of ABB's Electrical Distribution Solutions division explains to Kelvin Ross how switchgear has come full circle in terms of sustainability.

Unassuming and softly spoken, Adrian Guggisberg strikes me as much a listener as a talker.

Which I suspect makes him a good boss in his role as President of the Electrical Distribution Solutions division at ABB in Zurich.

He’s been in the post since February 2023 but has been with ABB for 27 years in a variety of roles, “mostly associated with large motors and variable speed drives”.

Guggisberg, who holds a degree in Electrical Engineering and another in Business Administration, could tell you in minute detail what drives these drives. But what drives him?

In his first interview since he started his new job, he reveals that it starts at home. Married with two children, he says: “For me, family is key. Raising children is probably the biggest leadership school you can have. It’s where my energy comes from.”

Meanwhile at work, it’s all about “creating an impact.”

“Whatever job you have, if you have a mindset of creating an impact, you can create that impact.” He relishes working with colleagues to create solutions to make these impacts.

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“The impact is about the people around you and how you do things. I think people typically might not remember what people did, but more how they did things. That leaves footprints on us.”

He believes this notion of the value of the how and not the what extends to ABB as a company: “The value is knowledge: it’s not the product we have, it’s the knowledge and how to apply it to make something work. That’s the key.

Switchgear as 'silent enabler'

I meet Guggisberg at ABB’s switchgear manufacturing hub in the Czech city of Brno during an open day for the company’s customers. Earlier in the day, someone referred to electrical distribution solutions as the “silent enabler” of the energy transition.

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I ask Guggisberg if he thinks this could be taken to mean that electrical distribution solutions are the overlooked ‘unsung heroes’ of the energy transition.

He smiles — and doesn’t disagree. Then he says: “I would say the distribution network is the backbone. And I mean that literally: like your back. If that backbone is not working, you are not going to walk.

“And, as a human being, do I care right now about how my backbone is working. No, I don’t. But I’m going to care big time when it’s not working.”

He says that while generation projects such as offshore wind farms are “very visible, very touchy”, switchgear in comparison is “just a grey box. It’s not that sexy — but it’s super relevant.”

Sustainability and collaboration

This relevancy is very much now framed in the context of enabling a clean energy transition, yet Guggisberg believes sustainability has always been at the heart of ABB.

“If you take the large motors and drives business, its main value proposition is about energy efficiency and saving energy, which is a sustainability purpose.

“At ABB we once had this slogan: ‘power and productivity for a better world’. That’s closer to what we talk about today, actually. I think we’ve gone back to our roots — to the basics.

“So, in that sense of what we do, I think sustainability was always there.”

The drive for sustainability at ABB does not just come from within the company: an increasing number of its customers are demanding ‘green’ verification for all parts of the manufacturing process.

And this is part of a new spirit of collaboration within the energy sector that Guggisberg finds particularly exciting.

“We need to team up: to partner with our customers and our suppliers in a different way. We try to share, we try to engage, we try to bring things to the table.”

All of the above, he says, is part of helping ABB’s customers move with the energy transition.

“It’s about anticipation. We are working with customers to help them make the [energy] transition.”

Collaboration isn’t just external either. Guggisberg highlights how one arm of ABB will have already tackled challenges being faced by another arm of the company.

“We have a division which does electrification of marine. And they’ve been solving those problems for decades.

“If you take a cruise liner, then that ship is an island network – it’s a microgrid: an aggregate of all these ingredients we are talking about in [industrial] clusters which the [onshore] microgrid will have in the future.

“There are a lot of lessons learned: a lot of knowledge is there and therefore, the lessons learned offshore can applied onshore.”

He observes that “innovation happens a lot by combining knowledge. I think 100 years ago, a lot of innovations were in one subject. I think today, a lot of innovation comes as you start to combine things.”

Combing ideas to solve the challenge of a shift to a net zero landscape is the biggest challenge the energy sector has faced in decades: and it’s a challenge Guggisberg relishes.

“I like it that we have such a challenge in front of us. It creates an impact. And we can make an impact. I think we have the technologies and have the people.

“If we can bundle them together to solve the problems, that is great… there’s not much more to say.”

Now read this: A proactive mindset is vital to accelerate the energy transition, says ABB President