Show notes
Rosemary just got back from a conference and, like many of us recently, feels discouraged. Attendees and meetings were insightful, but the presentations and panels lacked impact. Allen has often felt the same. The two unpack their issues with recent wind energy conferences and discuss possible solutions to make them more valuable.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my great co host, Rosemary Barnes, who is just back, fresh back from the Australia Wind Energy 2024 Conference in, of all places, Melbourne, Australia. And Rosemary and I were just talking offline about some of the proceedings and the events that happened in Melbourne, and I thought it'd be a good discussion to get out into the greater uptime audience.
Rosemary, first off, welcome back, and can you give us just a couple of just top level what was going on in Melbourne australia at this wind energy conference?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it was actually really focused on offshore wind this time. We I would say two thirds, three quarters, maybe more of the sessions were like explicitly about offshore wind, it seemed, and when it wasn't explicitly about it, then people were trying to shoehorn it in, which.
On the one hand, it makes sense because that's the, next big exciting thing coming. But on the other hand, we have literally zero offshore wind currently, and we have many things that could be improved with our current onshore wind rollout. I did think that there, it was a bit unbalanced in that way.
This conference, it was amazing in terms of everybody shows up to it. I, I think I was just back to back meetings the entire time really targeted at all the people that I, Wanted to talk to for, the various projects that I've got going on. So in that sense, it was incredibly successful and and had a great time.
But yeah, when I did find the time to step into some of the presentations, which is what you pay for after all, it's 1, 500 for two days. And yeah, the sessions that I went to, they're just getting. Worse and worse. It feels less and less like anybody cares what the experience is like for the attendees, what they might be hoping to get out of it.
And it's just purely about extracting money from everybody, extract money from the exhibitors, extract money from the sponsors, extract money from the keynote speakers. People don't realize that the keynote speakers are all, they're all paying to stand up there and speak to you like, like a lot.
Yeah, pretty significant amount. And some of them are good, but you don't know ahead of time. And for the most part, people pay their 10 grand or whatever it is and stand up there and give you a sales pitch. And that's not valuable to the majority of the audience. Yeah, another complaint just on the panel discussions.
The panels are just way too big. You have a panel with 10 different people on it you spend half of the session just introducing everybody and then they've got to give their little pitch about their company because they've got to get something out of it. And then, yeah, there's not, there's too many people to have an actual discussion, usually not many, or maybe not any questions from the audience, certainly not addressed in a meaningful way.
And you have sessions like a session on, it sounds like it should be interesting session on supply chain challenges. That's a huge challenge for for wind everywhere in the world at the moment including Australia. And. You have a, an hour long session and they mentioned the word supply chain, but it's just Oh yeah, and obviously supply chain is an issue.
And then, move on to talk about something else.
Allen Hall: And let me ask you about that. Let me ask you about that because I've been to a number of conferences this year and I don't want to name the ones I've been to specifically, but the attendance in the discussions was quite small, typically, unless it was a technical subject, something that people were having problems with out in the field.
Thanks A couple I remember from this year or last year was like concrete foundations and problems with concrete foundations on turbines, right? That's a big issue. Another one was lightning damage or qualification of damage to blades and trying to quantify what's cat one versus cat five.
Trade and industry standard, that was well attended. But some of these that are policy driven or politically driven discussions are just not well attended. Is that the same thing you're seeing on Australia?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It's actually interesting that you should mention foundations because that was the sole good keynote that I saw was a guy from total ground engineering who has a, his He presented some very compelling information about why the current standards for foundations are becoming less and less appropriate as the turbines get bigger and presented some innovative solutions towards that.
So that was a win. That was probably the sole interesting thing that I actually learned from sitting in the audience. Yeah, I and you're right that they're not very well attended because probably everyone is thinking the same thing as me, that this is not the point of the conference anymore.
The point is that people that you meet and yeah, early, like a few years ago when I moved back to Australia and I found myself with no network in Australian wind industry. So I went to the conferences and, I needed to Randomly chat to people and bump into people and pull people aside after a presentation to talk to them.
But this time, every single conversation I had gotten in touch with them. Either I already knew them or I had planned out ahead of time and got in touch on LinkedIn. So yeah, I'd say that the last bit of value that's left at these, the conferences that way that they're being run is the app that they have where you can actually, search by company, say who's going to be there from the different companies and then.
You figure out who you want to talk to and send them a message. They also had a semi cool feature where you can send a meeting request. And if you put your availability in the calendar, then it will hook you up and you go into this room. It had a real speed dating vibe about it.
Everyone's just like awkwardly looking around for who they're supposed to be meeting. And then, yeah which, yeah, it was funny but that's actually useful. But yeah, it's just, it is becoming pretty hard to justify the price and. I don't know. It's been years since I went to a European conference.
So maybe they're following this same same business model as the Australian and American ones now. But the last one I went to in Europe, it was really about the information, that they had people presenting and they would ask people to talk because they thought they had something interesting to say, not because they wanted them to pay a lot of money.
To get up there and talk. Yeah, so I just really think that they've got to rein it in a little bit. Get at least keep your panels of a moderate size. I know you've got to let every sponsor have a spot on the panel, keep it at a size that where it's possible to have some sort of interesting communication happening.
Get a moderator that actually knows how to moderate with the audience in mind, okay. Given the session title and the participants, what are the audience going to want out of this? And then, keep people on track. Don't allow it to become just like a a sales broacher of them, verbal sales broacher for their company talk about the things that people are hoping to learn about otherwise, are people going to keep on going?
Maybe it's irrelevant, but I would have thought that exhibitors are only paying because. The number of people that come through the door and the same with the sponsors of the conference. They're not going to want to sponsor. Yeah. Like 10, 000 keynote that has three people in the audience attending.
I could, you know what? They could better spend that money on sponsoring social media content instead and get a much wider view. Yeah. Viewership, listenership.
Allen Hall: Let me ask you why you think this is, because I have a couple of thoughts and I'm going to throw some at the wall here and you tell me what sticks.
First, is that they choose conference venues that are super exclusive slash expensive, like overly done. And so those conference places cost an enormous sum of money to book, to hold, and to then to make some money on as a conference exhibitor or a conference holder. The economics are not in your favor when you do that.
Used to be when we held conferences, I've been to a lot of Holiday Inn, Ramada kind of conferences in the United States, a lot less expensive, more attendance just because the entrance fee went down, then the hotel wasn't as expensive. I think cause you're, you mentioned the 1, 500 to attend.
There's a reason why that is, I, was it one of those fancy Melbourne hotels or conference centers?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. It's in the Melbourne convention center, which they all, they always are that. Yeah. They're all there. And then. It's fine. It's nice, but it's also expensive. You want to stay close.
So then your accommodation is expensive too.
Allen Hall: See that, that, that doesn't help the attendees.