Kieran Ivers, CEO of Green Rebel Group

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

Can you introduce yourself and your business, please?

My name is Kieran Ivers, I'm the CEO of Green Rebel Group. Green Rebel is actually a collection of companies who are kind of like a mini conglomerate. Green Rebel was established just over two years ago in Ireland to service the offshore wind industry.

Green Rebel is focused primarily on data acquisition and data processing to inform developers during the consenting process, data that helps judge environmental impacts, but also influence and give data on engineering design out their wind farms. As of today, there are actually four key areas to our business.

The marine team operate a number of survey vessels, typically they would be used for geophysical surveys on proposed wind farm sites. Our flagship vessel being the Roman Rebel, is a 35-meter vessel and then scaling down to a number of inshore vessels, down to a number of ribs. Each of those vessels has a number of different purposes, some are further offshore than others. Typically, we would drive the demand for those vessels internally with our own geophysics team, but we also are active in the charter markets, supporting other developers or supporting other service providers in that area. So, I alluded to the fact we have a geophysics team as well, we have a service unit both onshore and offshore scientists who will go on our vessels and acquire the data. Once that data is acquired on a proposed wind farm, it then comes ashore, and we have a team at Green Rebel who will do the necessary processing and interpretation and provide reports to teams within offshore wind farm developers. We also have an aerial ecology team. certainly, at the early stages in the DEVEX phase, certainly in the UK and Ireland, the technique of aerial based ecology is prominent. We operate a number of airplanes out of Cork Airport here in Ireland and we do that based on ecology, basically assessing birds, migratory patterns, mammals, and other objects on the seabed. So that's a 24-month process.

We also acquired a company, a limerick company in Ireland called IDS Monitoring. They are a company with over 25 years’ experience in the Med Ocean area. So effectively measuring water quality waves and currents. But through some innovation, we also developed a platform called Floating Light, which effectively helps wind developers quantify the wind resource, which again informs ultimately the price and how much output they can get from the wind that is there, which then informs engineering design. So that's a really key part of our business with a a real international appeal. We also have another department which is Green Rebel Hub. Green Rebel owns quite a large amount of property within Cork Harbour, which over the next 10/20 years will no doubt be a hub for offshore wind energy. Looking at our brand and looking at how we evolve our brand and extend our brand in the future, that's kind of another project we're working on.

Just thinking about Ireland for a second, Kieran. There have been some big announcements from the Irish market over the last week have led to some exciting moves.

There is, the first RESS auction in Ireland happened just a week before last actually, and it was a real positive step in Ireland's pathway towards offshore renewable energy. I think it's worth mentioning in the preface that there was a time when Ireland was a pioneer when it comes to offshore wind energy. I think Ireland's first offshore wind farm was built in Arklow Bank. As of today, it has over 400 onshore wind farms producing something like installed capacity of 5.5 to 6.5 gigs. That's where Ireland's focus was, and it was probably down to the cost of offshore versus onshore at that time. Right now, as of today, wind in Ireland generates one third of our overall energy needs, which is phenomenal. Acceptance of wind energy in Ireland is very, very high. I think a recent study I heard at the Wind Energy Ireland conference, a recent report or a poll showed that 80% of Irish people are very much in favour of wind providing our future energy needs. I think opposition is only at 5%.

Moving forward to last week, that process, some of those six developers that were looking to go to the RESS auction had been in the process for 12 plus years, I think. But nonetheless, we now have something like 3.2 gigs committed. They are Statkraft up in the North Irish Sea, we have RWE, we have Corio Generation, and we have a combination of Fred Olsen and EDF on the Codling Bank. Really good first steps in, and I think the one that really gives a lot of attention for me is is the site on the West Coast, the Sceirde Rock sites for Corio, because I don't know have you seen Ireland's Western seaboard and the Atlantic Ocean? But if you can build something out there, you can build it anywhere. It takes some of the economic activity away from Ireland's East Coast and puts it on the West Coast. So, I think all in that's been really, really positive, and subject to planning permission, which is the next phase they go through, we would hope that those sites would be operational and producing energy by 2032, which would be fantastic.

That is phase one in Ireland that gets us some way to our own domestic energy requirements, not the full way. Ireland's 2030, 2032 ambitions are around seven gigs, five gigs around are far domestic use, and then a further two gigs for alternative offtake, probably hydrogen in this instance. So, there will be a Phase two RESS auction happening next year where again, a lot of developers more on the South Coast and East Coast and some of the West Coast will vie for more positive results.

You're obviously based in Ireland, but you're not million miles away from the UK markets. Do you work in what Scotland and England and Wales regularly?

Funnily enough, as of right now we're working in all three jurisdictions probably as I speak. We're in the Isle of Man today, but one of our vessels doing survey where we have a large buoy just deployed 70 kilometres off Peterhead in Scotland and we're running lines on a site and with area ecology team down in Wales.

I'm conscious that a lot of our audience are interested in offshore renewables as a potential career path. There must be lots of different disciplines within Green Rebel. Can you just talk a little bit to some of those different types of people you've got in the team?

As I said, Green Rebel is like a mini conglomerate at this point, and I suppose foundationally we've put in a team of we call it our shared services team. It's your typical services that are required to run a business your finance function, your HR Function, your business development function your I.T. function. They are shared resources, and they take up about 20% of our headcount. I would say very few of that team have any experience in offshore wind and all are delighted to get into this industry because it's a really interesting industry. It's quite purposeful in how it's set up, that is kind of the foundation of our business. You're right, not everyone is offshore, we have about 25 of our 100 who operate offshore, the remaining are onshore. We have a huge variety, a very young workforce, a very optimistic workforce.

Why does offshore wind matter?

Offshore wind matters. We look at the triple benefit, and I know this has been mentioned on previous podcasts as well, but the whole decarbonization piece is ultra important. I'm very bought into the environmental benefits of offshore wind. People tend to focus on the damage to fishing and people tend to focus on the damage to ecology.

I believe in balance, and I believe that actually the biggest threat to both of those institutions is climate change. Offshore wind is one of those, I suppose, really important initiatives for Ireland and other countries to embrace to help tackle that.

The second piece, and I know it's been mentioned, it's energy security and it's energy independence because think about where Ireland is not dissimilar to the UK. We're on the periphery of Europe and traditionally energy has come from Russia and has come from Germany, and it's gone from basically east to west. The opportunity for us now is to take energy from west to east and be a net exporter of our energy. It's hugely important to both of our economies, that it is recognized and that we can move fast because other will take our lunch.

Third piece and maybe the one that most appeals to me being in business is the economic opportunity, the opportunity for job creation, the opportunity for reinvigoration of our coastal communities, the opportunity for critical infrastructure improvements in ports and harbours around Ireland.

Why is innovation so important to Green Rebel?

Innovation should be important to every business because the world moves quickly. Having looked at this industry and when I got into this industry, even now, offshore wind is very reliant on the conventions of oil and gas. When it comes to geophysical survey, it's get a big vessel and fill it up with people and off you go for 10/12 days at a time. But it need not be that way. Innovation and not standing still is critically important.

And the offshore wind developers. Are they ready adopters of innovation?

We see a mixed view on that. I mean, I probably relate it to a developer's risk profile, Moray if I'm honest. The larger developers are more likely to, even within tender, score innovation as a reason to choose a particular supplier. I've seen many large developers investing in innovation, so they have funds available to push forward. At that level, very, very supportive, I guess maybe where we have developers working closely with consultants or someone needs to justify the selection of a vessel, and someone needs to justify their own selection of a plane. I think it just feeds back to my earlier point, if we as an industry can focus on the output, then it gives license to the supply chain to look at different ways of doing things.

I'd like to find a little bit more about you. Can you just take us through your career, please.

I'm a college dropout. I initially studied food science and that didn't work for me, so I dropped out of that and served my time as a carpenter. I'm well used to hard work and cold scaffolding bars in the morning and physically demanding work with my dad who also worked in that industry, he said look you have a choice here, you can either stick at it or go to college and at least get a degree and fall back on something. So that's what I did, I got a marketing degree and very quickly started working in ad world, an ad agency in Dublin. Incredibly from a communications perspective, I think marketing as a discipline is so good that it covers so many bases.

In that time, I worked quite a lot with the Department of the Environment here in Ireland, working on a number of different campaigns. I also worked with other large utilities in that time. I then moved into a large bank in Ireland, Ulster Bank, part of RBS Group, and very quickly figured that this isn't for me, large companies being a number, very much more suited to smaller companies. I moved to a large data company here in Cork, a internally communication software company, big data, selling product to some of the largest companies in the world.

There we really got a sense of how to handle data, how to manage data, how to do business with literally global companies because it's one thing to have assets, it's one thing to have a great idea. But doing business and the expectation of large global companies is it's a whole different ballgame. Then that company was acquired two years ago by a large American VC. The opportunity came up in Green Rebel and at that point Green Rebel was just going through its competency phase and looking to build a business development function. Again, taking my learnings on data, taking my learnings doing business with large multinational companies and applying them to the marine environment, I wouldn't say it's been relatively seamless, but certainly it's a learning that you don't necessarily need to have a background in this industry to be able to impact this industry and feeding back to your innovation point earlier, if you if you indulge me, you know, we're seeing quite a lot of layoffs in Ireland now in the tech industry, but tech and ideas in tech and letting robots and AI replace some of the processes, there's opportunity in this industry as well. If anything I'm testament to the fact that no experience required and as long as I can enable the people who know what they're doing to do what they do best, then my job is done.

You're Chief Executive of the Green Rebel Group. How do you define success for the group?

There is one obvious answer, and that's revenue, that's key that we will look invest in our growth here. So, anything that we make at Green Rebel will be reinvested. Growing the company and taking on more projects. Last year we achieved north of €12 million in one contract and every single cent of that would have been spent outside of Ireland if Green Rebel did not exist and continuing to build on that and providing inspiration to other entrepreneurs in Ireland to follow the path that we've gone down. We've made plenty mistakes and are happy to share those mistakes as we go down. But you know, we've learned fast, and we fail fast. One of the things that's very important to me and it's very important to me because it's kind of a pay it forward. I've been very lucky in my career to have managers that have really managed me well and given me every opportunity.

In your own personal life, how would you define your own success?

I mean, I'm a very simple person, and I have three young kids at home, and as long they're happy and I'm happy, as long as I'm coming to work every day and it doesn't feel like a drudge, the Sunday night fear, I'm fortunate to say I haven't experienced that in a long, long time.

In each of our episodes, we ask our guests to set a question for our next guest without knowing who it's going to be. In the last episode we met Davis Larssen, the Chief Executive Officer at Proserv, and Davis set this question for you. How do you ensure that the decisions you take today will be reflected positively in 15 to 20 years’ time by the market, our children, and the environment as a whole?

I suppose it feeds back to again, perfection is the enemy of the good and don't strive for perfection. At a policy level it's important for us to recognize that nothing is going to be perfect, and you can't bake a cake without breaking a few eggs.

Ultimately all of this is for the greater good. I think it's important for our officials and for our politicians to ensure that the greater good is represented. As I stated earlier, 80% of Irish people are very much in favour of wind meeting our energy requirements. So, it's taking that on board, and I suppose driving on, as I say here in Ireland. Also, it's very important that data leads decisions and in the absence of data mistakes will happen. Ireland is fortunate actually that we've been slow to the party because we're going to invest heavily in getting the data right and let those database decisions actually expedite the process later as we move through the planning permission phase. I was very encouraged to see this week a wind farm in the North Sea, I think it was off the Netherlands, where turbines are actually being switched off for migratory birds to run through the wind farm, but that's a product of data and that shows the co-existence between environmental and offshore wind can happen, where data is used to guide the future of what we do.