Show notes
Maya Malik, co-founder of KIMAenergy, joins host Rosie Barnes to discuss local content in offshore wind. Drawing on examples from the UK, Denmark, Japan, Taiwan and Australia, they explore policies to encourage domestic manufacturing. Maya shares insights on the key factors for success, including providing certainty on project volumes, offering incentives and infrastructure, and exploiting the potential for low-emission manufacturing in Australia's growing offshore wind industry.
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Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have with me today, Maya Malik, who is the co founder of KIMAenergy. Thanks for joining us, Maya. Thanks, Rosie. Happy to be here. So today we're going to be talking all about local content and how countries can try to get more manufacturing in their region when they're going to be installing a lot of wind energy.
So I know this is an area that you've worked in a lot. Would you be able to just give us a bit of background about the kinds of work that you've done in this industry over the years?
Maya Malik: Yeah, sure. So I have a 20 year background in energy and offshore wind. Actually I first started in, in petrochemicals working in Australia and Europe and Asia.
On the construction projects and 13 years ago, I moved to offshore wind. So I worked on projects in the UK, in Europe and Asia. And then together with my business partner, we started up KIMAenergy, which we are an advisory company focused on offshore wind in APAC. And I guess our niche is doing offshore wind in new markets.
For most of our careers, we've basically worked on projects that are, pioneering in nature in the countries that we've worked in. Now we are based in Melbourne and yeah, continuing to support other developers with their projects in new markets.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. So you've worked a lot on a lot of different offshore wind projects all around the globe. I know that from the conversation that we've had before, before this recording. Can you tell me about yeah, just a little bit of A few examples of some interesting offshore wind projects that you've worked on.
Maya Malik: Most interesting and I guess most impactful for me was working on projects in Taiwan. I'd worked on projects in Europe but there, the industry developed quite organically over, a period of two decades projects, getting incrementally bigger and technology incrementally improving.
And Taiwan, I would say was the first market outside of Northern Europe to implement offshore wind and also was doing it in a way to accelerate the industrialization. So go from, doing commercial scale projects over a period of multiple years to, a handful of years. Yeah I I moved there together with another colleague from my company, and we were essentially there to win projects and, do a show in for the first time in in Taiwan.
And yeah, it was a really It was a cool experience. Yeah, just really not having, the suppliers, not having the experienced people on the ground and just, it was down to, you and what you knew and, the resources you could personally call on. To do to do projects.
Yeah, it was a real growth experience, I think for all of us in the industry at that time. But yeah, super, super great achievement.
Rosemary Barnes: You're Australian, but you started in Australia. And then Europe, you're in Denmark. Is that right?
Maya Malik: I was based out of the UK working for the main Danish utility.
So yeah, that was my second home. And then, I guess. Denmark did offshore wind, they were important in the innovation of the technology, but UK were the ones to really take it to a commercial scale. So put the policies and targets behind doing offshore wind at volume, allowing it to industrialize.
And then the next market to do that would be Germany. I was quite involved on those projects as well. And then we started looking outside of Northern Europe. Yeah, there was an important period in 2017 when the auction price for Osherwind showed that, the LCOE was cheaper than gas.
And then it really changed everything. And in our industry and I would say exploded at that point and then, yeah, and then the first market that, that would move to implement offshore wind fastest was Taiwan. And for me, it was, I'd lived in Asia before and I loved it and it was closer to home.
So a great chance to do lots of things and tick many boxes.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. And now back to Australia where we're only just getting into gear now. Can you talk a little bit about Yeah. What's going on with offshore wind at the moment? I think a lot of our listeners are based in the US so might not be a hundred percent familiar with what's going on in Australia, but yeah, it's an exciting time.
Can you, yeah, to summarize where we're up to now? Yeah, sure.
Maya Malik: So yeah, it's a kind of, it's a late market, quite an immature one, but actually they. did a fantastic job to very fast put in place the framework to award seabed rights. And I would say, the framework they put together is amongst the clearest I've seen globally.
So it was very, transparent and easy to understand what you had to do to secure exclusivity for your offshore area. So Australia is following a two stage process to award project rights. So first, there's a competitive price to give away CBAD exclusive rights for CBAD area. And then there's a second process to give support for revenue.
So this will be similar to U. S. and other countries like U. K. and Korea. And the process towards CBAD rights is done by the federal government. So they do it across all states in Australia. Yeah. And they have essentially looked across the states, where there's developer interest, where it was viable to do offshore wind and where there was supporting infrastructure that could be developed by Carbis.
And they basically narrowed it down to six areas. And they have released what they call a draft declared area for all sex and some are starting to be finalized. They also have released invitations to apply for what is called a feasibility license, which is essentially your exclusive right to develop in an area.
And yeah, the first licenses have just been awarded weeks ago for an area in the state of Victoria called Gippsland. And I think the second area will be in New South Wales that will be announced soon. And then the next step, awarding revenue, is going to be run by the state government rather than the federal.
So there's limited information on the regime and exactly how it will work, but it's expecting that it will, be very similar to the UK CFD regime.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so the, they've announced six, six areas right in Gippsland. And then I saw that there's another six shortlisted. And I was a bit unsure about what happened there.
Did the government like divide up the area into parcels of, I want to always want to say land, but I guess parcels of seabed and let people bid on them. Or was it up to developers to pick what they thought would be a good spot and then choose exactly which area. First zone
Maya Malik: has awarded licenses. So this is a zone of Gippsland.
And then 12 licenses have been awarded in Gippsland. Yeah, equivalent to about 25 gigawatts of offshore wind. And of these 12 licenses, six are confirmed and the other six are in the process of being confirmed. Yeah, then in terms of how it, how the framework is designed and how you select and are awarded your sites.
So what the government does is initially announces a declared area. An issue is an invitation for developers to apply for a feasibility license. And for Gippsland, the area was 15, 000 kilometers squared and each developer could apply for as many licenses they want. Each license was allowed to be up to 700 kilometers squared in size, supporting about two and a half gigawatts of offshore wind.
And then, the process to decide. Your license area was up to individual developers. There was no coordination and there was also many prerequisites. So in other markets, you might need to pre qualify by having certain consents and so on. But here it was essentially you were. To write a proposal that showed, your technical capability, your financial capability, and also how you would benefit the economy.
And then based on that application and the area you chose, government took that and made their assessment over a period of around eight months and they first decided who would Met the minimum merit criteria. So they had a criteria, financial ability and if you met merit criteria and put into the next level, and then they reviewed who overlapped with who, and then if you're, if you met the merit criteria, but you overlap with someone else who also met it, then the government has a kind of discrepancy to decide who has more merit.
And awarded to the person with more merit. So it's a little bit of luck in this, if you choose an area that no one else chose, then. Then if you meet the minimum bar, you're probably getting a license. But if you meet an area that a lot of people chose, then it's going to go to the person who is deemed, yeah, is the best developer according to the government score sheet.
And then in some cases they could say you were equal in merit.