I LUCY CRAIG I
Lucy Craig Director, Growth, Innovation & Digitalization The driving element throughout my career has been to work for a more sustainable future and make a positive impact on the environment. When I graduated from university, there were not many opportunities in renewable energy, but after a few years of gaining broader engineering experience – and a very formative year doing voluntary work in Nicaragua – I was lucky to land a job as an electrical engineer at Wind Energy Group (WEG) in London, part of the Taylor Woodrow construction group. Wind energy at that time was in its infancy. WEG had just commissioned a wind farm in California and was developing a novel concept 2-bladed wind turbine, which we then installed in the first UK wind farms. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of a team taking innovative technology through early stage testing to what we would now call a “minimum viable product”. Wind development at that time was dependent on government support and in the UK, after some initial public investments, the prospects for building more wind farms were not promising. So, when I was offered the opportunity of a research post at Manchester University related to the electrical design of wind turbines I decided to take it. The research work was carried out jointly with Garrad Hassan (GH), a small wind energy consultancy which had been established by Andrew Garrad and Unsal Hassan, who had also worked at WEG before leav-
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ing to start their own business. I was offered a job with Garrad Hassan after I completed my PhD – one of 30 employees, and one of seven in the Glasgow office. It was another exciting time: while the UK wind industry at that time was almost non-existent, Garrad Hassan had already gained an international reputation and I worked in projects across the globe: supporting customers with their early repowering projects in California, new wind farms in Italy, Portugal and the Canary Islands, a research project with one of the major OEM’s (now part of Siemens Gamesa) in Denmark and for a World Bank funded project in Cape Verde. Apart from the astonishing speed of developments in wind turbine technology since those early wind farms, information and communication technology has also developed very rapidly. At that time, mobile phone coverage was limited or non-existent at remote wind farm locations and often the only way of communication back to the Glasgow office during my travels, whether from the mountains of Portugal or the beaches of Cape Verde, was using the hotel’s fax machine in the evenings. So, if I had a question I wanted to ask someone back in the office, it would take at least 24 hours to get the answer – very different from today! Wind energy in Spain started taking off in the late 1990’s and I was asked to move to Spain to set up the first office for GH outside the UK. That early work experience in Nic-
