Are government targets for offshore wind achievable?

Industry experts contributed to a Prospect webinar held in early November to explore the Prime Minister’s pledge that every UK home will be powered by offshore wind energy by 2030.

Attendees included professionals working in the energy sector, as well as some members from Prospect’s wider membership who are interested in net zero issues.

The panel featured Michele Schiavone, director of offshore at EDF Renewables, and Tom Glover, chief commercial officer at RWE Renewables.

Here are their opening remarks, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Michele Schiavone, director of offshore, EDF Renewables

EDF Renewables is one of the largest renewable developers in the world and we are probably the main driver for the group to deliver ‘Cap 2030’ which is our key target to reach 50GW of renewable install capacity.

In our definition of renewable energies, we also have hydro which has played a key role for EDF in continental Europe in the past century, but the growth will be coming mostly from wind and solar.

EDF renewable has the capability to develop, to build and to operate the renewable assets. We tend to be present, and we want to be present, pretty much in all the phases of our renewable power projects from early origination to decommissioning.

We have a worldwide presence. Europe, of course, is where it all started, but North America has been a second key market for us and technically now is even larger than Europe in terms of our install capacity.

Other countries are becoming more and more important for our growth, especially in South America, Asia and the Middle East.

In the first phase of our development, our activities were mostly focused on onshore wind in England in particular. We gradually moved to Scotland, which has been probably more relevant for us in the last five years in terms of onshore wind. From about 2011-2014 we started our journey in offshore wind.

So EDF Renewable UK is one of the largest subsidiaries of EDF Renewable in Europe.

Today, we have approximately 1GW of assets in operation, and we have around 600MW in construction. That is between the offshore project we have in Scotland, two battery storage projects we have under construction in England and one onshore wind project we have under construction in Scotland.

I think we started in 2011 with the development of Teeside, which then was commissioned in 2013.

The site was of the so-called Round One, so first generation of projects in UK. Relatively small by today’s standards, a small project and we were relatively close to shore.

Our next step was Blyth, which was small in capacity but we were moving into large offshore wind technology. It was the second project in the world to use the MHI Vestas 9.5MW turbine, which are normal machines today but 4 or 5 years ago we were really at the start of this large rotor commercialisation.

Also in terms of a cables and connection, Blyth was the first project in the world to use 66 kV subsea cables, which again today are pretty much standard technology.

Then NnG, which is the project we currently have under construction, it’s a bit less than 500MW and is a 50-50 joint venture between us and ESB, the Irish utility.

It’s in the Firth of Forth and with this one we’re really moving into large scale offshore construction.

The next step for us would be the large project we have in advanced development, or probably should I say pre-construction phase in Ireland, which is Codling. It’s a joint venture between us and the Norwegian company Fred. Olsen.

In offshore wind, it is common to see projects being delivered in joint ventures by industrial players.

So, it’s been a journey based on stepping stones. We had to learn, same as the rest of the industry, we had to learn the technology and this has given us then the confidence, and the skills to take on larger and bigger projects and challenges.

EDF was probably not the very first to offshore when it all started 15 years ago, but now see ourselves now well within the heart of the industry in terms of projects and skills.

I have focused here on UK and Ireland but then we have other pretty big projects currently under construction in France and in the US.

Are government targets for offshore wind achievable?

I guess we are focusing probably on the 2030 target, so 40GW of offshore that the government wants to see by 2030.

In essence my simple answer is yes, it is it is achievable, it won’t be easy but the key ingredients which I tried to summarise here are there.

It’s down to being able to turn the ingredients into good projects and deliver them. The pipeline of projects are there and the UK still has a quite a large amount of gigawatt of projects which are under development.

Today, between what is operational and what is under construction, we are probably approaching 15GW. That’s been delivered in the last 10 years.

So the challenge now is to deliver something around 25GW of capacity in the next 10 years. Broadly speaking I think it’s a challenge and a target that can be met.

Now because the industry has moved forward both in terms of technology and in terms of capabilities of the developer and the utilities, the investment appetite is there.

The supply chain has been growing, in terms of size, in terms of skills and solutions. It’s a fairly mature supply chain now both in terms of turbines, cables and offshore logistics.

The only challenge I would say is the fact that offshore wind has become very popular worldwide. Up to recent times it was really only UK, Germany, probably Belgium, Holland and then Denmark.

It was a fairly small list of countries that were dealing with and it was not necessarily too difficult to find the right contractors and the right supply chain for the projects. Normally, the manufacturing capabilities were readily available for good UK projects.

Now we will be facing more competition on the demand side, so there will be other projects in other parts of the world, which will be competing for the same slots from manufacturers.

Personally, I think the target is set at the right level, it is achievable and it is important for net zero.

As of today, this kind of scale can only mostly come from offshore wind. It is important that other technologies will come and we will follow their journeys. But in terms of scale, inevitably, offshore wind will play a key part.

Tom Glover, chief commercial officer, RWE Renewables

I’m the chief commercial officer for RWE Renewables globally. I look at renewable projects across the globe that RWE does and see whether it’s commercially attractive or not.

I’ve only got so much money to spend, so I will look at if it’s best to put it in the US, is it best to put it in the UK, or whatever.

I have a part-time role which is UK country chair, which means I’m extremely biased towards UK, so the good news is that when I do these allocations I have a slight soft spot for the UK.

RWE have got a 44GW portfolio in 20 countries and by the end of 2022, we’re committed to invest at least 5bn euros in renewable energy globally.

Turning to the UK, we employ over 2,600 people in the UK across, 80 sites and that’s across a really diverse portfolio from hydro, gas, biomass, onshore wind and offshore wind.

We produce enough electricity for 10 million UK homes. The most surprising thing that people have known about RWE for a long time is that we were seen as quite a traditional generator. This year is we set ourselves a Net Zero target carbon target by 2040.

I’m proud of that because we were one of the dirtiest power generators in Europe and I always say if RWE can do it then, everybody can do it. So there are no excuses for electricity companies not to get to Net Zero.

I mean in terms of offshore, our first offshore wind farm was 2003 and we’re currently investing billions of pounds in the UK.

We’ve got the Triton Knoll offshore wind farm under construction at the moment, the blades just arrived on site literally this week, so that’s 857MW that we’re constructing with our partners.

We are working on the Sofia wind farm which will be 1.GW, one of the largest in the world when constructed. That’s a huge project, just to put it just to put it in context, it is 195km offshore.

Probably what’s more interesting for people from Prospect, which is about jobs, and skills.

The UK government estimates there’s about 7,200 people directly employed in the offshore sector today and certainly near those offshore areas you do see good knock-on benefits into the communities.

That workforce is projected to triple by 2030, so there’s a massive requirement for the workforce. What’s the big issue then?

It’s the normal issues that all industries have, which is the shortage of engineers and STEM qualified people. This is a big problem for all industries, that are trying to develop, not just ours.

For those of you who are my age and have kids in education, you see how hard and how difficult they make STEM subjects. Probably more difficult than they need to be for a lot of the STEM jobs that are out there. We need we need to address that.

We need to encourage more young people into these subjects and particularly more women.

How are we going to meet the offshore targets of getting about a third of women employed by 2030, when at education level we’re seeing just 10% or 20% of young girls choosing STEM subjects?

This requires not just companies to do it, but also governments to really think about how they do STEM education.

The other thing for us that we focus on is senior level apprenticeships. Obviously, the oil and gas industry is going through a big period of change and therefore we really want to encourage senior level people from those industries to cross train into renewables.

It’s important we all do our bit and I counted how many initiatives we have as a company for skills-based training just in the UK offshore sector, and we’ve got over 15 initiatives.

One is our apprenticeship schemes. So we started our offshore apprenticeship schemes in 2012 and we’ve trained way more than 30 apprenticeships on offshore through that.

More generally we promote STEM. We encourage our staff to be STEM ambassadors, we give them time off to do that volunteering and we give them money towards charities if they volunteer for them.

We invested in a Champions for Wind scheme where we sponsored teachers in the Humberside area, together with our partners, to get teachers to be champions STEM subjects within their areas.

We provided free places for students to the Global Offshore Wind Conference to get them interested in the topic; we have visitor centres at Rampion and Scroby Sands; we go into schools etc.

So as a company, we really try to get people to get into STEM. That’s one of the challenges where we talk about the question, is offshore achievable? Yes, but skill shortages is one of those things that we need to address very urgently.

Are the targets achievable?

So the latest policy is 40GW by 2030. That’s a huge ramp up, but the industry can deliver now. I’m sure of it.

Unfortunately, grid connections are probably the thing that delays most projects now and it’s the one that is really not fit for purpose.

Our view is the onshore connections and offshore infrastructure grid-wise is probably the only thing that will really stop 40GW.

The are reports of four electricity lines all crossing across one point on the Suffolk coast. We understand as an industry that’s not acceptable, that it’s not acceptable that your beach gets dug up. Politically, it looks unacceptable and it looks uncoordinated. That needs to get sorted.

It’s well recognized the UK is the leader in fixed bottom offshore, and that’s because we went early, which now means you can export the skills etc.

We want to do that for floating as well. Floating is the next big market. There are lots of countries in the world where the seabed slopes so steeply, it’s just uneconomic to fix the turbines to the bottom, so you want to float them.

RWE wants to be a world leader in this technology and really it’s up to the government to work out where that technology gets built.

So some parts of it like the floating infrastructure will probably be local because you can’t really transport big concrete floating bases halfway across the world, but the technology and the intellectual property of that can be developed in the UK, and exported.