Adam Morrison, UK Country Manager at Ocean Winds

Interview by Moray Melhuish – Founder of Annet Consulting, an Offshore Wind and Subsea Specialist

I am delighted to be here with Adam Morrison today. Adam is UK Country Manager at Ocean Winds. Welcome to the podcast Adam. Can you introduce yourself and Ocean Winds please Adam?

I am the Country Manager for Ocean Winds UK. Ocean Winds is an international offshore wind developer, and we aim to develop, construct, and operate offshore wind assets in a number of different markets. We were formed in 2020 by EDP Renewables and ENGIE to focus on the offshore wind market and to grow, which we have done quite successfully in the last few years.

Nearly 17 gigawatts in our pipeline and around a third of that is in the UK. So, the UK and the Edinburgh office is a key hub in our business.

What can you tell us about your UK portfolio then?

We have got a really interesting portfolio now, particularly off the back of ScotWind results last year, so we have a mixture of assets in different phases. So, Moray East is operational, Scotland's largest fully operational offshore wind farm at the moment. Hot on its heels is Moray West, which is now in construction, so two projects in the Moray Firth that together will deliver nearly 2 gigawatts of power.

But we have now also got development pipeline all located in Scotland, comprised of a site called Caledonia which is predominantly fixed bottom offshore wind site near Moray East and Moray West in the outer Moray Firth, and two sites located just off Shetland. So, a very diverse portfolio, the Shetland sites will be floating. So, next year’s technology will be a mixture of different phases that all those projects are in.

Can you give us a flavour for the type of budgets, the number of people? Tell us a little bit more about what it takes to deliver windfarm projects like this.

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that's really fascinating about offshore wind in particular, the amounts is staggering. So, we're talking about £2 billion plus capital investment projects and the spend even in the development phase, you typically are looking at tens into hundreds of millions just during the development phase of these projects. It's a staggering amount of investment and we can only do that successfully with the right people to do it.

That's really the core of what we do. I would say in particular, in our hubs like Edinburgh and Fraserburgh, where we have got staff that develop and build and operate these projects.

Great. And what's the time scale like for delivery of these other projects? So, you mentioned Morey East, Caledonia.

So the next thing on the horizon in terms of operational projects is Moray West and we hope to have more that fully operational by 2025. So, it's in the middle of construction at the moment. It should start producing power next year, be fully operational by 25 and we then like to deliver Caledonia by 2030. That depends on delivery of grid connections for all the Scotland projects. But Caledonia, we want to bring forward quickly. It's one of the only fixed bottom sites that was awarded through ScotWind, and we believe we can be fast with that site.

The Shetland projects are more complex in their nature because they're very remote and so we need to work with our partners on those projects to identify the route to market and the best way to bring those projects forward, which we're working on at the moment. But we're ambitious here about getting these projects delivered quickly.

How does your supply chain look for delivering these projects? How many direct suppliers would you have for the construction of wind farm and what type of goods and services would they be for?

Traditionally in construction phase, offshore wind has been delivered on a multi contract basis, but with a small number of large contracts, so, wind turbines, foundations, cable substations. But then there's a huge number, probably into the thousands by the time you complete a project. If you go through development and construction phase into the thousands of smaller contracts that you order and the size of those. So, we're interacting with them, so another thing by offshore wind I think makes it really interesting to work in is just the breadth of different supply chain capabilities that we need to draw on from local legal services through to international fabrication manufacturing contracts. Nowadays there's been a move towards progressively more multi contracting. So that's something that we are doing, for example, at Moray West.

Okay. Can you tell me more about supply chain constraints? Are there specific areas where you see shortages, for example, or challenges?

Yes, it's complex, particularly at the moment because of world events, of course. But I think the three I would pick particularly are foundations and that that's largely driven by scale now of foundations, whether that's fixed bottom or floating offshore.

The scale is incredible. So, there are very small number of places that have the infrastructure and the people to produce, to fabricate steel work on that sort of scale.

Another example and, you know, I think that this is very much a current day issue for the industry, both for construction and operation, is large vessels have. Again, the scale of what we're installing now is enormous, wind turbine technology keeps growing, which is what's helped bring the cost of energy down. And so therefore there's quite a small range of vessels that can actually install the type of equipment that we're buying and so that is present day constraint. But there is investment going into going into that new, larger next generation class vessel appearing. Then the third, which is kind of often forgotten and it's maybe not seen as being the most exciting bit of the supply chain, but I think is absolutely crucial is electrical equipment. Even if you look away from the wind farms into our energy networks, we need to transform our energy networks around the world and the scale of investment in transmission networks, so things like cables and transformers is incredible.

So you mentioned your footprint in the northeast of Scotland, in Fraserburgh, you must have quite a considerable footprint locally there.

We do, so we have a base in Fraserburgh. We're developing a new base in Buckie as well. So, we'll have a hub across those two sites. But we've also built electrical infrastructure across two different substation sites with different cable routes as we have been present in that area now for more than ten years, either engaging through the development of our projects or by building facilities and having offices and having presence there.

Thinking about the impact off offshore winds more broadly, how do we address concerns around biodiversity?

I expect that we're going to face progressively greater scrutiny here as we deploy more and more. So, there is cumulative impacts of what we do and also floating offshore wind brings a different type of interaction with the environment in certain ways. So, we can never rest on our laurels now. But we're subject to quite a lot of scrutiny through the planning process.

So, I do feel that it's something that we as a developer do well or aim to do well. We've got a very strong team and a lot of in-house capability and we're subject to a lot of scrutiny. So, these projects have to show that they've assessed the impact that they're going to have very carefully before they're deployed.

The other thing I would say, and again, bearing in mind the planning trajectory here, we want to deploy fixed and floating offshore wind in a greater scale, we have to keep data gathering and that's connected with every project, but also just in the round as an industry we have to keep data gathering so that we are constantly able to assess what is best practice.

We work with the universities and other research institutes and consultants to make sure we're constantly evaluating our approach to this and making sure that we're adopting best practice.

Tell me about your innovation team.

Yeah, that's something we're proud of. It was formed early in the life of Ocean Winds. I think probably the core rationale is that we're constantly pushing the boundaries as a sector. If you look at some of the things we're doing in our portfolio, for example, we're using next generation wind turbine technology, pushing the boundaries of using monopiles in deeper water.

We're constantly pushing. So, it makes sense to then make sure that structurally we're looking at innovation within our business. And so that team is there to coordinate innovation activities that we're doing across the portfolio and make sure it's championed. So, it looks at all different technologies, but I think one area that's particularly interesting is floating wind, where there's a lot of innovation still to come, although we've deployed one of the largest floating projects in the world, continual innovation is going to be needed to fully commercialise floating offshore wind

What was it about the UK that made ocean wins

want to invest here?

We had a cornerstone project, so Moray East I would say is typically described as one of the cornerstone projects of the Ocean Wind's portfolio. So, we had that within the existing portfolio that was already a joint venture between EDPR and ENGIE. So, that gave us the starting point. The UK market is one of the largest and that's through relatively long-term political support for the sector, and that's crucial now, there's now ever-increasing international competition in this sector, so keeping the investment conditions right, so that international investors like us continue to spend money developing and building projects is absolutely crucial.

So, we were in the UK market because of the seabed made available and there was support and that gave us the cornerstone projects. But now to build on that, we need to make sure as a country that the investment conditions stay right and that we can keep building projects.

The UK is one of the world's largest markets for offshore wind. How do we keep the UK in that leading position and any changes that you would like to see made to enable that to h appen?

Yeah, it's really important that the UK doesn't rest on its laurels. I think make making sure investment conditions are right is one thing, but perhaps away from offshore wind project delivery, I think much greater ambition on how we deploy our energy networks is needed. We've historically taken a very precautionary approach to building new electricity networks in order to protect the electricity consumer and that, of course, is well intentioned. But I think we need to start treating it as an emergency and building our energy networks on an emergency footing, so that's the key change.

And I'd like to find out a little bit more about you. How do you come to be UK country manager for Ocean Winds? Tell us about your career.

So I started in wave and tidal nearly 20 years ago, which was a fantastic few years and very cutting edge. And I ended up in wave and tidal almost by complete accident, but it was an amazing few years working on that that side of the sector in Edinburgh. I then did a whistle stop tour of different technology, so I moved into small onshore wind and then larger onshore wind and eventually the offshore wind sector over ten years ago. I've been here in that space since and I've been working on the Moray Firth projects actually for near enough ten years now.

Are we doing enough to get young people into our industry?

We can never do enough. I think we're doing more and more, we as a developer and I think the sector generally is doing more and more. The word collaboration can get overused sometimes, but I think there's been some good collaboration around skills and STEM initiatives. We're upping our game, but it is a challenge, the skills problem is going to bite us. I don't think it's only young people, I think we need to look broadly how we bring more people and a diverse range of skills and backgrounds into our sector.

So, we've got to sell why people would want to work in renewables. We think it comes naturally to us, we work in renewables every day and we love it. So, it's something that we take for granted, I think, but we need to we need to sell the sector and we need to make sure we commit enough time to developing our next generation of workforce or we are going to run substantially short on people.

As the country manager for the UK, how do you define success for the organization that you lead?

A key success factor for us is safely deploying and operating our projects. The work safety has to come first, what we do is diverse and there are a lot of risks particularly, but not only when you look at the offshore construction aspect, but we're dealing with water, electricity, excavation, everything. So we have to put safety in front of it and safety of our people is always going to be top of my list personally. But then we're here to deploy and operate projects and to maximize the performance our wind farms. So, those are top of my list

As a successful guy in the industry. Adam How do you define success for yourself personally?

That's a very tricky question. For me, I think working with good people on something I enjoy and something that's varied as well, so in my current role it's very varied and that definitely makes me tick. Certainly, offshore wind offers generally a great deal of variety from one day to the next. You never quite know what some of these projects are going to throw at you from one day to the next. So, that motivates me personally. I mean, more broadly, health and happiness of my family.

In each episode we ask our guests to leave us with a question for the next guest without actually knowing who they are. The last podcast we recorded; Episode 12 was with Alan McAskill, Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Flotation Energy. Alan left us with this - How do we get power all the way from the wind farm to the consumer? How do we improve the processes of getting the grid connection so we can supply energy to the people?

So, Alan must have known then it was going to be an electrical engineer fielding that question who's currently on a soapbox about all of those things. So, how long have you got? I think we've probably covered this slightly already. It's a well-known problem and it's a very nuanced problem as well because there's historic bits of regulation, there's supply chain constraints, there's how you make sure the consumer is protected while we spend a lot of money on all of this, because we will need to spend a lot of money on it. And we need to be prepared as a society, I think, to invest. So, it's a very nuanced problem and I'm trying to bundle it up into a sound bite that I think it needs to be on an emergency footing.

I'm quite convinced that society will see the benefit of investing in our energy networks. Historically, it has, I think people in particularly rural parts of the country recognize the societal benefit of having energy networks, energy security and jobs. So, I think I'm convinced it will be low regret for us to invest in our energy networks on an emergency footing.