This article was written by Tony Quinn, Director of Technology Development at ORE Catapult.
As colleagues from around the industry gather for the Global Offshore Wind conference in Manchester this year, there will be the usual debates and discussions about the various challenges and opportunities facing the sector.
For me, one of the debates that should be front and centre is how we make the most of recent developments to solve one of the biggest challenges we face as a sector, namely, how we drive increased UK industrial benefit through an industry wide approach to technological development.
Our current approach focuses primarily on creating the right business environment. Step one is a strong policy and regulatory environment led by a competitive CfD regime. The second step is to ensure a regular rhythm of auction rounds to ensure a strong future pipeline.
The third step is to remove barriers or provide incentives for supply chain businesses to invest in production capacity – examples include Freeport status or the Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Scheme.
So far so good. Tick, tick, tick.
But to date we’ve only delivered moderate success. We have not generated the long-term confidence to secure significant supply chain investment in manufacturing facilities that will really signal an economic success.
To supercharge our industrial growth there is, or needs to be, a fourth step, and that is how the industry collectively secures technology confidence. To date, the OEMs have been expected to shoulder the full responsibility, and risk, for this stage in the process. There is clear evidence that such a situation is not sustainable and, even worse, counter productive. Just as we need OEMs to be in expansive mode they are downsizing and being more selective over the projects they pursue.
So, how do we fix that? Most importantly, in my view, we are all stakeholders in the technology risk and therefore it requires a collective effort from developers, OEMs, Government, and research organisations, to coalesce around a strategy for driving the increased confidence in the technology of the future.
It also means that we have to get out of the mindset of learning by doing. By that, I mean deploying technology on a project by project basis, which is a slow iterative process of learning.
If the UK is going to feel the full economic benefit of the future roll out of offshore wind, we need to invest sufficiently in late stage research programmes which ensure that complete systems and sub-systems have undergone robust test regimes prior to deployment, to assure all stakeholders that project business cases can be realised. The delivery of the higher volumes we are all hoping to see can only be achieved by investment in ‘design for manufacture’ initiatives. If we move quickly to resolve these challenges we provide the UK with the opportunity to secure a slice of the economic pie that offshore wind offers.
There have been positive steps in recent months. The Industrial Growth Plan fills a gap that desperately needed to be addressed by placing technology and innovation at the heart of our plan for economic growth. We also have the major investment, by UKRI, into our own testing facilities in Blyth, which can help the UK play host to the type of technical de-risking that only extensive testing can truly offer. This facility needs to be seen as a nationally strategic asset which can benefit all industry stakeholders in their pursuit of competitive advantage by fast tracking technological development and learning.
The hope is that these developments complete the virtuous circle, whereby the regular CfD auctions, strong project pipelines and investment incentives are supported by a focussed technology and manufacturing process ‘push’ that will drive investor confidence, improve reliability and, as a consequence, lower costs through reduced insurance and maintenance.
We have given ourselves the platform to improve the situation, and the work to do so starts now.