Offshore wind is a burgeoning industry right at the tipping point of moving from a test bed of new construction strategies and technology to a fully-fledged part of many European countries power generation portfolio.
Offshore wind is exciting; the scale of the wind farms and their turbines is huge. The amount of power that they can generate is vast with potentially a single offshore wind farm powering multiple cities. The financials concerning government backing, private investment and investor’s returns are great.
But the area where the industry is anything but massive is the volume of skilled, suited and available wind farm project managers, engineers and technicians. Studying a degree in offshore wind farm project management or construction is simply a dream. Believing that there are hundreds or thousands of those graduates to employ is folly. The industry is too new, too firm in the belief that everything we’re doing is brand new and that it all has to be designed from scratch.
But the wind farms still need building, and in the UK that could be close to 7000 unique turbines (depending on the make and models used) for Round3 projects alone. So we’re seeing a previously unexplored or underutilised pool of talent approached; The former servicemen and women of the world’s armed forces.
