Forward thinking
Offshore wind technologies could soon be big in Europe – and K2 Management knows what’s needed to bring them forward, says Mike Farish.
As the drive towards developing renewable generating technologies into a major element of Europe’s energy profile intensifies, a number of factors remain that are holding it back. One of them is simply a shortage of key managerial and technical skills and experience caused by the industry’s rapid pace of development.
The opportunity for a new company to enter the market with the specific objective of providing a service to help fill that skills gap was self-evident to Per Melgaard and Lars Hammershøj, two individuals with extensive experience in the area, when they decided to set up K2 Management in 2007. The aim was to provide support for developers and operators across the whole scope of project planning, preparation, management, procurement, contracting and support, using the knowledge of carefully selected senior managers with actual wind farm project development and construction experience.
Since then the company has grown steadily and opened further offices in both Germany and the UK to support developments in those countries. The latter is located in Chelmsford, Essex, and went into operation at the beginning of this year. It is managed by director and partner Mike Prowse, who joined K2 Management after spending more than 15 years working in various roles involving offshore construction, with the last eight of them in the offshore wind business.
Prowse acknowledges that in itself there is nothing unusual about the provision of project management and consultancy services. But he says that what sets K2 Management apart is the concentration of specialist expertise within the group and the total focus on renewable energy, which at the moment is predominantly around offshore wind. He says that across Europe the organisation has full time access to the skills and experience of around 25 employed individuals, all of whom have been handpicked for either their technical expertise in their field or their specific management experience in this sector. “We can call on a vast amount of knowledge and experience specifically related to development and management of onshore and offshore wind projects,” he states. According to Prowse this capability has an important implication - it means that any consultant from K2 Management can always access someone within the group with experience that is relevant to any particular problem.
As he explains the relative newness of the renewable energy industry, and particularly the offshore wind sector, compared with, say, the offshore oil and gas industries, means that even the larger developers may not have people familiar with every type of problem they may encounter. “There is a shortage of people who have worked on multiple projects and that is the only way anyone can gain real breadth of experience,” he says. Prowse himself previously worked for heavy lift provider A2SEA and before that as renewables manager for cable laying specialist Global Marine Systems. Interestingly, though, he does not argue that the overall speed of development of the industry will be seriously impaired by a lack of skills. Instead he simply believes that “Unfortunately the same mistakes will be repeated on different projects” and that “Individual projects will run into problems that could have been avoided if lessons previously learnt from other projects had been available to the project team”. Ensuring that relevant expertise is available to and used by developers is therefore the crucial thing.
When asked if there is a best way for developers to employ support from external sources, Prowse explained that there was not a ‘one size fits all’ solution, as it was dependent on the experience and existing capabilities of the developer’s team. “Some developers have very limited relevant in-house experience and benefit from embedding a K2 Management team into their organisation to provide project leadership, while others with more experience may simply be seeking to supplement their established team through outsourcing particular packages of work”.
But one area about which Prowse is quite emphatic is the likelihood that the company will find a lot of call for its services from the UK market in the coming years. The reason, of course, is the UK Round 3 offshore wind farm development programme which he describes unambiguously as “the most ambitious initiative of its type currently being attempted anywhere in the world”.
As this programme ramps up, Prowse indicates that he believes that one particular, but often overlooked issue that will crop up, and one that K2 Management feels it is well equipped to handle, is that of “interface management”. He explains that the term can be used in both an engineering/design sense and also in relation to procedural and responsibility boundaries. In the former case it can refer, for example, to the design of a J-tube to take a power cable from the seabed into the turbine structure. In the latter it could denote the possible confusion that might arise over the responsibility for heavy lifting operations between an installation vessel operator and a wind turbine supplier’s installation team. “In many cases development problems occur as the result of a mismatch at an interface between two scopes of work rather than from specific problems or non performance within a clearly defined area of responsibility”.
Ultimately Prowse believes that major players in the industry will build increasingly comprehensive in-house skill sets. However, that will take time and given the pace at which the whole industry is growing he feels that the demand for external assistance of the type K2 Management provides will remain strong.
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