 Good afternoon, and I'm really pleased to welcome you to this webinar, part of the 2020 ESB IIA lecture series entitled, Rethink Energy. I'd like to particularly thank the ESB for their sponsorship of this event, and it's great that so many of you have been able to join us today. We are delighted to be joined by Ella Weinstein, founder and chief executive of Trident Wins Incorporated, a deepwater offshore wind project development company. Maybe a special word of thanks to Ella for being so kind as getting up or joining us at about six o'clock in the morning in hard time. Ella is a founder of Trident Wins, a, as I say, deepwater offshore wind project development company. She leads the company's efforts in developing a commercial scale floating offshore wind farm off the coast of California. Ella has been in the field of marine renewables for the last 20 years. She currently serves as energy appointee to the Washington State Coastal Marine Advisory Council, and she's the U.S. Department of Energy Ambassador to the Women in Cleaned Technology Initiative. She's an active member of the American Wind Energy Association and a frequent speaker, both in the United States and in Europe, on the development of renewable energy. She was first president of the European Ocean Energy Association. She knows us quite well here in Ireland. She'd speak to us about 20, 25 minutes, and then we'll go into a question and answer session with you, our audience. You'll be able to join that discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom. You should see that on your screen, and I'd urge you to send your questions throughout the session as they occur to you. You don't need to wait till the end, and it's helpful to us all if you identify yourself and your affiliation when you ask a question. A reminder that today's presentation and the Q&A session is on the record. You're also, of course, free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEEA. Now, it's my pleasure to hand over to Jim Dollard, Executive Director for Generation and Trading at the ESB to offer some introductory remarks on today's most timely topic. Jim. Thank you, Owen. Good afternoon, Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen, and I suppose our special guest, Ella Weinstein, you're all very welcome. I am pleased on behalf of ESB to welcome you to this discussion, the Retink Energy Lecture, the fifth in this series. Series we've been in partnership with the IEEA and a partnership that's been in progress with the IEEA for over a decade and a very successful partnership. Today's lecture from Ella is very timely, as we aim for 70% renewables by 2030 and indeed beyond now to 2050. Ireland has set very ambitious targets, and 2030, as we all know in project development terms, is today. It's not tomorrow, it's today. To deliver 2030, it's actions today and beyond. ESP has played a huge role in renewables since its foundation in Erdogan Crusher was a renewable investment, and in recent years we continue to make strides in that regard. Renewables is now playing a huge role in the Irish energy industry. I think over the last 30 days, I looked at this yesterday, 47% of the fuel mix in the last 30 days is from renewables. It's a very significant figure and one that will only grow towards that 70%. Wind has played a huge part in that, and Ireland has been very successful. We now have over 4 gigawatts on the system, which is an incredible achievement for an island nation. But the challenge ahead, no doubt, as we move way beyond that to 70% is significant. ESP has and will continue to play a huge role in renewables. In the last year, we've commissioned two major wind farms, both in Oninni with our partners, Bordemona and Grousement, which is one of the largest wind farms in Ireland. So 150 megawatts delivered, and that is in onshore wind. But more and more now, we know that the future will more and more depend on offshore wind. And in recent years, recognising that ESP has invested heavily in offshore wind, both in Britain and Ireland. Over the last two years, we've taken a minority stake in the Gallupur wind farm. We have 50% of Nartnaguiha wind farm in construction off the coast of Scotland. And we've just announced 50% acquisition of a development project, Inge Cape, which is 1000 megawatts. That's in Britain. In Ireland, we have major ambition for offshore wind. We see offshore wind in the coming decade and beyond being a huge bulwark for the delivery of Ireland's targets. And I suppose we've grounded that in terms of the Oriole wind farm, which is off the coast of Dundalk. And I hope most people will know now we have a major partnership with Econor, which is looking at a number of sites around the coast, on the east coast, the south coast, and indeed the west coast. I suppose I'll conclude with saying we see offshore wind being a huge part of ESP's future. We see floating technologies as being essential in doing that. And it's ultimately we look to harness what is a huge resource off the west coast. Floating offshore wind will be part of Ireland's future and ESP's intent in playing its part. So in conclusion, I want to really welcome Alla today. It's a really exciting time to have her speaking with us and really looking forward to her address. She has deep experience in offshore wind on two different oceans and she's an influential policymaker in the area. Alla, you're very welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for the invitation. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Last time I think I spoke to this audience was probably around 2013. And as I was founder and CEO of Principal Power, the company that developed floating support structure. And it's a pleasure to be here now talking about more implementation of projects rather than technology. Yes, we need technology, but it's just technology, right? If you don't use it, it just becomes a nice toy. So I'm going to talk about how offshore wind and in particular the offshore wind of the west coast of Ireland in deep water could be contributing to your ambitions. And the ambitions are significant. When I read the papers just to get myself familiar with where Ireland is today compared to 2013, it was impressive to see that you want to deliver almost 30 gigawatts or 35 gigawatts from offshore wind. And I hope most of that is going to be from deep water because shallow water, as you probably well know, the sites are becoming kind of scarce because there is just too many installations already. So we're going to start to at least what I thought I would do is I will do three topics. The first one is the state of the out of floating offshore wind technology. It is important to realize that we are past the technology inventions. We're even past probably technology prototyping. We're really entering the commercial stage of technology exploitation. I'm going to talk about the California experience because that kind of led to a lot of lessons. And then look at Ireland and floating offshore wind and we'll conclude with a short video that I want to leave with you to underline that same point where in a time when floating offshore wind is becoming commercially deployable and that's what we're going to be seeing in a very short time. So looking at the world, I think it's important to realize that most of the best wind resources are really located in the water depth greater or deeper than 60 meters. 60 meters is an accepted break point between the use of fixed foundations and floating foundations. And just by looking at this map of the world, you can see how much there is darker color rather than the lighter color. Sorry, Anna. Will you share the screen, please? That's... Oh, I'm not sharing the screen. Sorry about that. No, no, that's... I thought I was sharing, but we will... There you go. Okay. That's great. Thank you. Okay. And you can see it, right? Yep. Okay. Sorry about that. You want full screen. Excuse me? If you bring it to full screen? Yes, it is full screen on my screen. That's it. That's great. Thank you. Perfect. Okay. So if you see this chart, which is the chart of the world, then the world oceans, you will notice that the darker color, which is really deeper water, is there is a lot more of it than lighter colors. Continental... Other continental shelf of every continent will vary in its width. And in some parts, like the West Coast of the United States, actually most West Coast, it's going to be fairly shallow and fairly narrow rather. So even in Ireland, you know, the part that on the West, yes, you will have a certain amount of of other continental shelf, but it will drop to below 60 meters fairly quick. So effectively, if you think about it, the fixed foundations of the wind is kind of intermediate stuff. I think what we're going to see going forward is going to be a lot more development in deep water offshore wind. Now, I want to make a little bit of a step back and say, what is happening and why do I say that this is going to be happening? Back in the 70s, you may remember that offshore oil and gas exploration moved from being fixed foundations to floating. And effectively, for the same reason that there was more resources available in deep water than there were resources in the shallow water. Well, the same thing is happening with offshore wind. We are moving from fixed foundations, which is a picture on the left-hand side, where the foundations are sitting in the bottom of the ocean floor to floating foundations, which is similar to what happened in the oil and gas industry in the 70s. Technology principles of how they work and all the hydrodynamic capabilities really do come from the oil and gas industry. The industry also gives us another advantage of not only proving technology-proven principles, but also regulatory and environmental impacts. We can see how things move and how things work in marine environment. And we can drive a lot of lessons, which we have, because the basic principles are very, very similar. And so, yes, today what we see is exactly what happened back in the 70s in oil and gas industry. We're moving from fixed to floating, and that's where the future of offshore wind lies. So today, there is quite a number of technology development. Back in 2008, when I started Principle Power, they were only to us in existence. First was Equinoa Formally Start Oil that installed its prototype of high wind in 2009. And Principle Power installed its first prototype in 2011. It's interesting for me to go back to that time when I met with the European Wind Energy Association back in 2008, looking for some funding to develop technology that may have been available at the European Commission. The answer was new a little too early. Come back in about 15 years. Well, we proved them a little bit different. And we were able to go to Portugal. And with a combination of EDP and Portuguese government, we were able to put the funding together. And we did prove them wrong. We had a prototype two years later, not 15 years later. And it's hard. And it's really good to see that 10 years later, the European Associations recognized that floating ocean wind is here and now. And it is the future that we need to pay attention to. So while technology development continues, it's important to also realize that we are now in the pre-commercial stage of deployments. And as we move forward, we're going to see that we're going to be looking at commercial developments, no longer prototyping, no longer demonstration projects. We really need to understand and realize that we are entering the stage of commercial deployment. And because of that, our needs are different. It is not R&D funding. It is not wave tank. It is not test centers. It is really poor infrastructure, consenting, purchase of energy. Those are the elements that become important to get this industry going. So just to show you where there are, there are three companies that as the front runners, there is probably at least three or four behind them that's going to enter similar stages in the next few years. Equinor, as I said, was the first one that entered the space with a 2.3 megawatt demonstration in 2009. Then they installed 30 megawatts in Scotland in 2017. And next year, they're going to install 88 megawatt high wind tempered project that will now connect green energy generation with oil platforms and effectively power oil platforms with the energy from the wind. Now, that's important because it's no longer one single device. It's 11 eight megawatts floating platform installations. And that will be installed in 2022. It is already under construction, but it takes time to construct. And so that's what's happening. Principal power on the other hand installed its first device in 2011. That's a two megawatt demo. What's interesting about that device that after it completed five year very successful testing, it was disassembled and then moved to Aberdeen and then reassembled. So not only did it work for five years and demonstrated all its capabilities, I believe that's the first ever in the offshore wind history that the device was able to move from one body of water into a different body of water put together and operating now for the next, I don't know how many years, but that's important that we actually demonstrated not only that the turbines work very well on floating support structures, but it also that they could be suitable for multiple bodies of water as long as your wave climate and wind climate is similar. Windflow Atlantic, which is the picture actually you see in the middle, was installed in this year, a couple months ago. And that is already 25 megawatts. It is sitting in northern Portugal around the island of Castelo. And whenever you can go there, I suggest you go there and take a look because it's impressive to see those things installed. But what's even more impressive that already today, just about a month ago, the units for the kinkerton project that will be in south of Aberdeen or southeast of Aberdeen, that will consist of five nine and a half megawatt turbines are being installed as we speak. And going looking forward, there will be another installation in France in 2223. So by the time we get to, you know, the end of or rather in the next couple years, we're going to see a lot more installations. Ideal, which is a French developer, they have kind of chose a little bit different approach. They had more demonstration project that was one in Europe, which is a two megawatt turbine and it is on a concrete structure. Then they did another demo in Japan using steel of the same technology, but they now use two bladed turbine, which was a Japanese turbine. And there will be a four-unit installation in 2223 again in France that's going to use six and a half megawatt turbines and there will be four of them. So that is important to recognize we're not anymore doing prototyping. Yes, there are new ideas, new technologies that are coming up and they're doing the prototypes in various parts of the world, but we're really going towards commercial deployment. And that's important as it comes to Ireland. I think you will be better served putting your mind and money and time into commercial deployments rather than starting from scratch. So looking down the road and seeing where we're going to go from that, here is just a picture of what was installed this year. Oops, I'm sorry, I went the other direction. This is the installation in Portugal as I mentioned and I wanted to show you the picture just so that you can get the size of scale. We're not talking about small devices, we're talking about very large pieces of equipment and with that comes the need for the infrastructure and support these pieces of equipment. Just to give you an idea, this is the fabrication of the kinkardine windflow units. Just look at the size of the units and look at the size of the vessels that would be required to transport them. You will hear me say that time and time again, infrastructure matters, where you can build them, how close are the installation sites that can be done, matters a lot, matters in the times of cost and that's what needs to be understood from day one then when you start developing what you're going to create not only does bring huge economic benefit because of the capabilities that you will be able to realize but it also depends where is the infrastructure that those capabilities could be using. Now this is just a snapshot that was put together by Quest Floating Wind Energy to look at where we're going to be in the next decade I would say and we're going to be looking at significant amount of installed capacity. We could be approaching two, three gigawatts around the world of floating offshore wind and that's important to realize that put your effort, put your money, put your thinking into commercial deployment of floating offshore wind because that is where the future is. With deployment, with scale comes reduction in cost. When a pre-commercial arrays we're going to see significantly higher prices of anywhere between 180 to 240 euros per megawatt hour. It's really the commercial arrays and the commercial exploitation that going to drop the price significantly and will be approaching potentially fixed foundations and maybe even lower levelized cost of energy because floating offshore wind eliminates a lot of somewhat bottlenecks that fixed foundations have and that is the amount of work done on shore. Most of the devices will be built in the port and told and installed in their complete assembly wherever the installation is. Because of that you're going to eliminate need for a lot of heavy lift vessels and equipment that requires to be used for the assembly offshore and you will be able to install more in the same period of time. Now I wanted to give you an example and there are some lessons learned that came from that example. When I left principle power in 2015 I started TridentWinds for a simple purpose. We need to move technology into exploitation. Well you can't start exploitation on the west coast of United States when people were talking about offshore wind but not really seriously without doing it at scale. And so what I did is initiated the project in California for a gigawatt, 1000 megawatt of installed capacity. In the United States you have two levels of kind of permitting so to speak. First of all we have federal waters which is really out of continental shelf beyond the three mile limit that belongs to the state. And in the state waters you're going to have different requirements based on the state requirements. So under the federal law you will apply to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that is basically authorized to lease the out of continental shelf for renewable energy development. And the state in that case will be doing what's known as a consistency review but you're still going to be crossing the state waters of three miles and so because of that you have to work with both bodies of government federal and state. And so back in 2016 on January 14 Trident Wind submitted an unsolicited lease to request to Bowen. What is the difference between unsolicited lease and the auctions that you may have heard about? The difference is who requests the lease. A state may request Bowen to assess its waters and and prepare auctioning of the ocean floor to potential developers or a developer can initiate a lease request and that's exactly what Trident Wind did. And effectively January 2016 woke up California to offshore wind. They were not prepared for it. Now five years later it's a very different story. People are aware of offshore wind and they know what they want to do and they know where and how we're going to proceed. What's important also is to realize that you have a lot of conflicting uses of space and these conflicts have need to be resolved. Why do we not have an auction in California yet? Because there is a significant conflict with the Department of Defense. Until that conflict is resolved one way or another we can't proceed. Conflicts will slow down the process. The earlier they address the better it is. Now in California in two years after the unsolicited lease request was submitted California state law required past the bill or state legislation passed the bill called SB100 that required to supply 100% of electricity from renewable energy and zero carbon resources by December 20, by December 45. Since the unsolicited lease request and particularly in 2018 Trident winds formed a joint venture with ENBW North America. ENBW North America is 100% holy on subsidiary of ENBW Germany. One of the largest utilities there and jointly with we created a company called Castle Wind. Castle Wind conducted a study to see how and what benefits could be derived by California from offshore wind. As a result of this initiation back in 2016, Boeing have concluded that there are now a lot more developers interested in offshore wind development and in fact there are 14 of them that expressed an interest and now we're moving through the competitive process that will resolve in the auction as soon as the conflict with the Department of Defense is cleared. But what's important is when we did this study to see the value of offshore wind to California the study was conducted as I mentioned was commensured by Castle Wind but it was conducted by company E3 that does a lot of analysis. So the graph on the right is an interesting chart that shows you the value of energy at the different time of the day. Now California has a lot more sun than Ireland and so it has a lot of solar. But as you will see this dark line is the value of energy so the cost the more energy you have the lower the value is the less energy you have and demand is higher the higher the value is. So when the solar is speaking in the middle of the day your value of energy is the lowest when the sun is not there and the middle you know at the beginning of the day and the end of the day and your demand is higher the value of energy is higher. This line is offshore wind. Now compare that line to all the other sources onshore wind out of state wind solar you have the highest value to California coming from offshore wind and the reason is its profile is blowing 24 hours 24 hours a day it is available with a population is and this is just the numbers and so as a result of the study that pointed out that if California wants to achieve its target of SB 100 at the lowest cost offshore wind has to be a part of a mix to the tune of 10 gigawatts by 2040 in order for it to impact these targets that's important. So the lessons learned from the California experience so far because we have not yet had an auction and we're not really doing a project for today conflicting uses of space need to be resolved from the start do not underestimate public perception and the need for stakeholders and engagement we have the laws that actually discourage unfortunately developers to do early stakeholder entailments tried and win did that because of the unsolicited lease request but it's paying its benefit people are coming on board people understanding the benefit of offshore wind infrastructure west coast of the united states does not have any infrastructure to support the development of the structures as I showed you in the picture all that infrastructure is in the gulf of me of of mexico not on the west coast distance to port where you're going to be assembling the devices is your main cost driver if you don't have a final assembly where you can put the turbine on the floating support structure or an airport close by you're going to end up with a very high cost of energy transmission capacity matters whatever you generate you need to be able to put it somewhere if you don't have capacity in a transmission then you have to be able to do some storage and that becomes important off takers and the off-take regime matters as well and supply chain in order to attract the supply chain you need the guaranteed pipeline 10 gigawatts would be great if we can have it as a commitment from the state of california say this is how much we're going to develop because then supply chain will invest in creating its capabilities if it doesn't have that demand guarantee then you're going to be bringing things from somewhere outside and so effectively the bottom line industry developers supply chain need commitment in volume if the commitment and volume is there then things will happen and it's not even so much as the energy pricing while it's important at the beginning it's really that demand commitment that will drive prices down and it will attract private investment these are all the lessons that i learned now when i started to look at island it became kind of interesting i have to admit because i had to do some research it just be you know time passed and i wasn't really looking at ireland recently but i found some interesting some interesting things first of all ireland has a significant space offshore as compared to your landmass right so if you think about it you have three times or maybe four times offshore space as an economic development zone versus your own shore space and if you can utilize that offshore space effectively you'll be able to significantly benefit from exporting energy rather than importing energy however when you start overlaying things like marine life like shipping lanes like other conflicting uses of space the space becomes less and whatever authority is that manages the consenting and the permitting really needs to take a hard look at this conflicting uses of space and do some marine spatial planning and say here is where we can do offshore wind development and this is the level of what we can do it becomes important as you can see from the chart the wind resource is best in the northwest ireland if that is where things could be developed that would be great but as you will see on the bottom of the ocean floor chart and the colors this part you know is about about 100 to 200 meter water depth that's great for floating offshore wind and if it can be made available you can generate a lot of it but obviously generation of what we can do there will be a lot more than the island needs for its demand meaning that you need to think about where am i going to put it and can i store it and bring it to other demand centers so uh sustainability authority island predicts that 30 gigawatts of energy would come from offshore wind that's terrific these are all the benefits that ireland can derive now you just have to do it smartly and exploit it as quickly as you can with paying attention to what really matters and this is another study i found from the carbon trust that kind of put some numbers on what the target should be what port infrastructure would require in terms of its repurposing and the opportunities and how many jobs it can create i think these jobs are actually underestimated for three and a half gigawatts maybe you will get that but i think if you go to 30 you're going to gain significantly more economic benefits and jobs benefits but you have to start somewhere and so yeah i think the carbon trust footprint and roadmap laid it out pretty well what needs to be done but even the better paper did a better job and that's the airwind that the roadmap for offshore wind development in in ireland i agree with everything that was stated and i was quite impressed at how well that paper was put together in looking at the holistic approach of what needs to be done except for one item demonstration projects you do not need them they've been done around the world and it is much better off to spend time and money on something that can advance two things installations of commercial projects and storage offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind provides you two advantages in storage one is physical storage because you have deep water and deep water has pressure so you can actually store energy on the bottom of the ocean floor using compressed air and then discharge it when they need is but even the better one is hydrogen generation because you can combine systems and their size allows you to put things next to each other you can do hydrogen and with all the developments that europe has which is significantly more advanced than u.s hydrogen will be the driver of their economy and that's where the demonstration should be taking place in combining and demonstrating storage rather than just uh uh floating offshore wind demonstration this have been proven there are now probably 15 to 20 different demonstration projects around the world take advantage of what somebody else is doing and do it the way it could advance things much faster so the critical path out of that same document is again perfect except demonstration project skip it you don't need it just go directly to commercial exploitation 100 megawatts to 700 to a thousand in california we're going to be doing commercial projects immediately because that's all that matters if you want to achieve your levelized cost of energy as needed then if you want to achieve your benefits as you want them you want to go to commercial exploitation so i want to leave you with one video so that you can see how and what can happen and i think i need to do something here there we go to run this video but i think it's important to realize that today you don't need to do demonstration you need to do commercial exploitation you need to prepare your ports to accept these type of equipment this is a one-minute video from a transportation of the wind flow support structure from spain to uk which happened less than three weeks ago so the future of offshore wind is floating i didn't even say that dvgl did 10 years ago or 2013 the same year i met you guys and that's what you need to do and i think you have great opportunity to do it you have a perfect plan that air wind presented now you just have to implement it and if you skip the demonstration part and only focus on storage hydrogen or down or underwater storage and create your infrastructure to be able to do it and most importantly put the targets in place then i think you are going to see a great benefit from offshore wind and especially floating offshore wind on the west coast thank you thank you very much indeed hallow Weinstein it was a very stimulating presentation and i see questions are starting to flow in but i mean just that last minute of a video the scale of these things is just enormous but i think you've also underlined the scale of the opportunity you've talked about uh well seai have talked about 30 gigawatt um someone who i think you've come across eddy o'connor has talked about 75 gigawatt ireland is a major source of clean energy for for europe so the the it's a it's a really exciting prospect i think another theme though that you've you've emphasized throughout your your presentation there is the the infrastructure the need to have the right kind of uh i mean a a late much lamented colleague of mine own sweeney had a phrase which i thought uh summed up the challenge before us and he spent a lot of his life working on the development of offshore renewables and he argued that ireland had of course some of the greatest opportunities um in europe if not on the planet in relation to our size but one would said we have choices to make though is our role going to be a participant in this development or as the suppliers of the sandwiches to those who were making the development so um real challenges here um and michael omani has the first question here and he's he asks how challenging an environment is the west coast of ireland for offshore wind development and will wave activity influence the choice of floating technology ala well um the atlantic ocean is not as bad i would say a specific ocean so the wave climate in the pacific ocean is actually more severe than it is an atlantic ocean especially around ireland just because you have such a long fetch from japan to the west coast of united states you're allowed to build up of winds and waves and all that stuff so i would see that irish west coast is actually a better climate for structures that will be more cost effective because when you put the structure in the pacific ocean you have to make sure that it's going to survive the storms that you're going to see there you're not going to see the same intensity of the storms in atlantic especially on the west coast of ireland as you would in the pacific but it's all the matter of design when you start designing you're going to take your 50 year storms and that's going to be your med ocean conditions to which you're going to be designing it so it is it is it is usable and it is reasonable the wind float the first device that was installed was installed in portugal and while the wind resource was not as great as it is in ireland the west wave resource in that part was actually worse than it is in ireland just because again of a long fetch and where the location is so you do have actually very good conditions where the structures don't have to be over designed to withstand severe storms just because of where you located and and and the wave climate and the depth water depth in california we're in a thousand meter water depth in ireland you are up to 200 meter water depth big difference in how you design and what the coast are going to be especially for the mooring part so you actually do have much better adventurous advantageous conditions for the floating ocean wind very good thank you we've questioned from our former minister for the environment climate communications denis nocton he asks in light of the scale of the onshore infrastructure and the plans to decommission money point a coal fired plant over there in shannon is it not an ideal site in the shannon estuary for manufacturer and assembly to service Atlantic deployment of floating turbines and I can't say whether it is or isn't but I will say that whoever is the agency that's going to do the planning whether it's developers or the government of ireland need to look at two things where is the minimum or the least conflicting users of space that would allow installation of offshore wind and then look at that onshore infrastructure that could be repurposed or redone to allow development and assembly of these devices if you can build them locally you're going to increase your jobs significantly if you assemble them locally meaning you're going to be able to put turbine on the floating support structure just the ability to do that final assembly is basically going to bring you 2000 jobs per each gigawatt of installed capacity for the period of construction time so do your numbers they're very simple to do of how many jobs I'm going to get somewhere but the distance to port matters a lot and so when you know where you can install look for the shoreline and look at what can be repurposed and yes construction will cost money but if it adds about 100 million per gigawatt of installed capacity to redevelop a port as long as you have scale that is something that makes sense thank you and Denise Horan turns attention back to your your own experience she thanks you for a very interesting presentation and she says what specific stakeholder challenges do you or your projects encounter in the United States what level of community involvement well because Trident Wind submitted unsolicited lease request and because we had to do a lot of things upfront we worked with the local community of the city of Morro Bay and with a local fishing community and and put in place community benefits agreement and mutual benefits agreement with the fisherman that was done I think the first time in the United States where it was done before the auction actually starting and that became extremely important because you give people the sense of knowledge before you come in and say I'm going to do it you know nobody likes supplies and nobody wants to see things in your back ocean in the backyard and so giving people an opportunity to accept the fact that it will happen and be somewhat part of it maybe is important because your perceptions matter and what I found out that a while the prototype installations did a lot of work on assessing devices and the impacts on the marine environment we don't have a lot of published papers on the environmental impacts of the floating support structures that is something that would be good to do especially from these installations that are happening now to actually go and get some data collection and publish the papers to say here is what it is this is not a prediction this is an actual data that mere fact of the actual data and ability to give it to environmental community fishing community local stakeholders becomes an important element because this is not perceptions this is not prediction this is what will happen but you know when the only data we have today is actually from fixed foundations but they're very different you know you're going to have morning lines and cables where fixed foundations they all bear it so there's a lot of differences between and it would be good to get that data together and so maybe one thing that island can do is have your researchers do these surveys of installed farms and get the environmental data that would be beneficial to everyone. Very good thank you. Andrew Gilmour who's deputy director of research at the IAA asks how important are organizations like the North Sea's energy corporation in developing Europe's offshore wind grid and what are the consequences for Irish development given that the UK has left this organization the North Sea's energy corporation? I don't think I can answer the question of how important it is or not important but for Ireland because you have an opportunity to generate a lot more energy from offshore wind than you can consume you have two choices to make one is energy storage which is really compressed air or hydrogen or exporting that energy and exporting energy means cables means wires somewhere. Back in the days Eddie O'Connor had an idea of super grid I don't think that really got to the point where he wanted to see but his statement of 75 gigawatts of installed capacity was connected to the ability to export that energy to the continent. If that can be implemented either through physical wires or storage well that's your expert potential not only do you bring all the jobs that you can you know of thousands of job per inch gigawatt of installed capacity you now have the export revenues that you will be able to benefit from so I can't to add so many specifics but there's a concept of what needs to be really done. Another policymaker member of the European Parliament Kearon Koff who actually is a rapporteur for a key committee in the parliament he asks is the EU emissions trading scheme fit for purpose as more renewables come on stream now this may not be your particular area. Well it's not that sad it was what was it called it was called renewable no it was new entry reserve funding that allowed installation of the windflow of the Atlantic there's three units that I showed you so yes the emission schemes are important emission schemes allow projects to be built and as long as the future is building commercial projects your emission schemes will allow them to happen sooner faster because it gives the commitment that because it allows financiers to be able to finance projects better especially the new technology the new entry reserve was a great program that allowed a lot of new technologies come in place windflow of the Atlantic is one of them. Very good a pioneering one yeah and Peter O'Shea who's head of corporate and regulatory affairs at the ESB he asks on current projections how big will individual turbines be in 2030 and that's an excellent question and can we a second part can we anticipate an increase in load factor so I think the answer is yes to both so here's the example uh California unsolicited lease request 2016 planned on eight megawatt turbines as we are now looking and doing front-end engineering design we're really looking at or started rather with 10 megawatt turbines as we're finishing up in just one year we're already starting to look at 14 megawatt turbines but at time we construct who knows we may be at 17 it really depends on how technology can advance and still be possible to construct at some point you're going to get to uh two sizes that we just cannot handle but on you you reacted on exactly what I wanted you to react on when I did this video size we are talking about very large structures very large structures need very different infrastructure than you had before we're not building ships we're building platforms they're different and so yes turbines have been advancing incredibly in their capacity and by the time we get installed in 2030 2025 I would not be surprised if it would be 15 to 17 or maybe even higher capacity turbines load factor um they are increasing the load factor look at GE is when they announced their 12 megawatt turbine that already showed you that their capacity factor is much higher than prior turbines in all the matter of the designing and efficiency of the turbines themselves and so it is conceivable that we will see higher capacity factors and the load factors as well as the time moves forward okay I have a closely related question from Roscoe DC from EY Ireland he asks why is proximity of construction infrastructure on land so important if the floats and the towers can be transported so easily on on water could Spanish or Portuguese ports provide capacity to offshore island think about the time that it takes you to transport now let's assume that each unit that you install will need to have major repairs done once in its lifetime so once in its lifetime you're going to move this unit from its location to the place where you have to do major changes just calculate the time that it takes you to transport the units between wherever you are and whoever you need to be multiply by the quantity of units put the emissions on it put the cost of fuel on it and time and the answer will become very obvious very quickly okay thank you and Eilish Scott in Ervia asks do you see the integration of offshore wind and hydrogen as key to reaching our net zero emissions target I certainly do and that's where you should be putting your research money in system integration while the bits and pieces of technology exist we do not have a system complete we do not have that demonstration we do not that we find these elements and I think that's where Ireland can actually excel as you as your lab developers choose the technology that's going to be used instead of spending money on demonstration project on demonstrating floating offshore wind technology which have been demonstrated spend the money and time on demonstrating hydrogen integration because that will enable the floating offshore wind become the base load supply if the restorage associated with the generation of the intermittent resource you have a base load supply of energy and that could be great plus it can be also delivered to you know transportation sector and if transportation sector moves from electricity to hydrogen you immediately have another supply of energy interesting thank you there's a question from Owen Collins in Matheson the law firm and he asks do you see a role for corporate off takers in helping offshore wind projects get built or do you think the main routes to the market will be support schemes or wind farms operating on a merchant basis it's the former and users are very important to the for being the off takers especially in the united states where the schemes are very different we don't have necessarily governments buying and especially in california which is really different from any other state the state does not buy power the power is bought by utilities or the community integrators or the end users and so already today we're looking at the end users as they are my as our main buyers of energy so yes corporate end users are very important to the whole industry and no the industry should not be relying on the government support schemes that would be fine at the beginning just to kickstart things but as you move forward it needs to become market driven and that's why the end users become the market drivers because they are the end users how how how challenging for the industry are we just at this at this point in time we people talk about the valley of death as we move out of the demonstration phase as we seek to scale up to become a major industry for the floating wind is that is because fixed space wind is to a considerable extent mature now isn't it but floating what are the challenges in making that transition to a commercial industry well um i wouldn't say that the floating of your windows in the valley of death any longer i think it's on the other side but what you need you don't need this money to do demonstration what you need is support schemes to do the first commercial installation after that volume and economies of scale give you an ability for the levelized energy cost to be market competitive and so i wouldn't put it as a valley of death i put it as support of the front end or first projects remember that chart that shows the cost of the pre-commercial arrays to the commercial arrays that's where you need that support to say okay like the ntr 300 that did for windflow atlantic you know they covered the delta partial delta of what it will cost to build a small installation versus a large installation and that's what you want to be paying attention to just a kickstart and cover this delta of cost because economies of scale are not there yet okay okay i'm i'm just looking at another question that has just come in addressed to yourself and to Jim dollard from the ESP and it's from michael dole who's a member of the IIEA he says he points out the the new Dublin array proposal for an offshore wind farm 10 kilometers off the coast of Dublin and that that's something which there's public consultation going on at the at the moment a very sophisticated website actually very interesting but he asked would larger floating wind turbines located further out in the IRC be a technical and financially viable option for Dublin or alternatively the transmission to Dublin of electricity generated from offshore floating power platforms further away in the atlantic and i do you want to come in on that i mean i could hardly be expected to be familiar with the Dublin array proposal well i'm good to i'm good to answer it on maybe i'll just take a little bit to say think about your scale again um scale matters if you have a large installation your distance to to the delivery point which does cost money because it's a cable is going to be amortized over much larger volume of energy generation and so i'll turn it over to Jim obviously he knows a lot more specific but scale over cost becomes very important factor very good very good thanks i i think on the east coast i mean that you know the development of the east coast is going to be more likely to be fixed rather than floating the resource scale in terms of as you say relative to the west coast is small or it's still a very significant resource in the context of Ireland but relative to the west coast west coast is a vast quantity of resource which as Alice showed in our graphs goes way out into the ocean it's a much more limited um i suppose palette when you look at the east coast the east coast is well advanced now as well those projects that people are talking about they're in the mid-decade horizon and i suppose people are working now to existing technologies so i think you know the government has talked about five gigawatts of offshore wind and the east coast is going to farm the the bulwark of that over the next five to ten years those projects are in flight now and i think if you like the decisions are made that they're going to be um you know fixed in nature thanks very much Jim um ala i think um at this stage i'm i'm looking at the time and i think we're going to have to bring things to a conclusion even though you're starting your day we're heading into the afternoon but we're the time just to underline the timeliness of your intervention because just yesterday the european commission published an EU strategy on offshore renewable energy and i think it's interesting that some of the newspapers headlined the ambition of this plan of this strategy for a a 250 percent increase in the scale in what we were seeking to realize and actually they left out a zero they're talking about a 25 fold increase so going back to my initial reaction to your remarks about the the scale and the the excitement inherent in what you're talking to us about and now you're telling us about experience it is a very exciting prospect that you've told us about today and i think that we are all in this large audience very much in your debt thank you very much and also thanks for being up so early in the morning thank you ala thank you it's a pleasure it's a pleasure to talk about things that can happen and i think you have a tremendous opportunity as Jim said you know the amount of resource you have the amount of space you have few countries have as much so use it thank you thank you thank you it's very much bye bye now