Appointment
AtkinsRealis appoints a global market lead for power
By Staff Writer | 12 August 2026
AtkinsRealis has appointed Steve Vincent as Global Market Lead for Power, based in Dubai, as the firm expands its power business against rising demand for generation and grid infrastructure.
The role brings together the firm's power capabilities across regions and is directed at strategic market growth. It covers helping clients plan, design and deliver energy infrastructure programmes, and building relationships with utilities, developers, technology companies and government bodies.
Vincent has more than 20 years of international experience in the power sector. He was most recently Global Power Generation Market Director and Energy and Power Global Delivery Leader at Jacobs, and has worked across generation, transmission and distribution markets.
The firm places the appointment against rising electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, data centres and electrification, and the investment that follows across generation, transmission and grid infrastructure.
Power is a key growth market for AtkinsRealis as global demand for affordable and sustainable energy continues to rise.
Kate Kenny, Chief Growth Officer, AtkinsRealis
Why a Dubai base for a global power role
The location says something about where the work is. Placing a global market lead for power in Dubai rather than in a European or North American office reflects the concentration of generation and transmission investment across the Gulf and the wider region, and the proximity of that market to South Asia and East Africa.
It also reflects how these programmes are procured. Gulf power projects are commonly delivered as independent power projects with long term offtake agreements, which places the consultant's work early, in feasibility, technical advisory and lenders' due diligence, rather than only in detailed design. That is advisory work sold to developers and lenders as much as to utilities.
What the demand shift means for practitioners
Data centre load is changing the shape of power demand rather than simply increasing it. A large data centre campus presents a concentrated, continuous and highly reliability-sensitive load, frequently in a location chosen for land and connectivity rather than for grid capacity. The consequence is grid reinforcement, private generation and connection agreements negotiated project by project.
For those advising on construction contracts, the practical effect is that the grid connection is increasingly the item on which a programme turns. A connection date set by a utility is outside the contractor's control and often outside the employer's, yet the completion obligation may not reflect that. Where a contract makes practical completion dependent on energisation, without a mechanism for a connection delayed by the utility, the risk has been placed on a party that cannot manage it.
Senior hires of this kind are a reasonable indicator of where consultancies expect fee income to come from. A firm consolidating its power capability into a single global market position, and placing that position in the Gulf, is making a judgement about where the programmes will be.