Yesterday, I watched a Webinar on the challenges ahead with the latest set of Offshore Wind deployment off the UK coast, known as Round 3.
The first speaker, Maf Smith of RenewableUK, discussed the current state of the industry and the ways that RenewableUK were mitigating the problems associated with the huge scales required for Round 3. A particularly interesting point Mr Smith made was around industry confidence. In the last year, a significant proportion of members of RenewableUK have decreased their expectation of GW of offshore wind power to be deployed by 2020. This can be seen at around 7 minutes into the webcast. The fact that projects of this scale under these hostile conditions have never been done before both increases the stakes and potentially increases the challenges faced by the industry.
The second speaker, Matthew Knight of Siemens, discussed in further detail the problems associated with the scale of the Round 3 project, which will be deeper, further and larger than any previous offshore wind projects. Interestingly, his focus was on the advantages of collaboration between all stakeholders, even those that are competitors. The nature of the offshore wind industry (first of a kind, complex, in a hostile environment, huge sums of money at stake) means that collaboration could give huge cost reductions (~20%), outweighing the potential margins of a more competitive system (~1%). A quote from Mr Knight (at 31 mins) really sums this up well:
"[offshore wind]... cries out for collaboration at all levels."
In my mind, Mr Knight is calling for offshore wind to compete as an industry against other electricity sources (offshore wind, solar, fossil fuel etc) on cost rather than competing on cost within the industry.
Both speakers were really interesting and gave their own take on the potential problems and possible solutions, and I will be watching more Windpower Monthly webcasts in the future to learn more about this industry. I really enjoyed my time working on Round 3 at the Crown Estate so it will be interesting to see how the collaboration aspect of the industry develops; it was definitely something that the Crown Estate was focused on as well.
Overall, definitely worth watching!
The link to the webcast is below.
http://www.windpowermonthly.com/webcasts?commid=90159&source=JHLI
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