Offshore wind giant hopes to avert skills crisis in training deal with Melbourne Uni

The race for talent to help develop and build offshore wind projects has begun, and one of the biggest project proponents in Australia, Flotation Energy, has struck a deal with a local university to source skilled workers and locally-applicable research.

The UK-based company signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the University of Melbourne’s engineering and IT department to train students in the new field.

The arrangement will see students trained in offshore wind as well as allow Flotation Energy to use some of the research emerging from the university in its local designs and training processes.

The start of the MoU hinges on Flotation receiving a licence, expected this year, for the 1.5 gigawatt (GW) Seadragon Offshore Wind Project off Gippsland, which it expects to start building in 2028 and finish by 2030.

Flotation Energy was bought by Tokyo Electric Co in November and is a specialist in fixed and floating turbines.

It is also investigating a 750 megawatt (MW) project offshore from Portland in Victoria and has been working on the 1.5 GW Perth Array Offshore Wind Project since 2019.

Skills shortage on horizon

The frenzy of activity in the nascent offshore wind industry, in a country with no expertise or experience in the field, is likely to create a dramatic labour shortage as project owners fight for limited talent.

The nature of offshore turbines — larger, higher capacity machines that require fewer people to maintain them — means fewer people will be required over the long term to work in the industry, according to analysis from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at UTS late last year.

But Australia needs to put in the resources to train people now in order to capture the benefits later and not have to bring in international workers, author Jay Rutovic said at the time.

“We do anticipate a skills crunch in the future, which is why we are partnering with the University of Melbourne and other educational institutions. We think we have really smart people in Australia, we have the right people, we just need to up-skill them,” Flotation Energy acting Australian managing director Carolyn Sanders told RenewEconomy.

“We need to make sure the people who are coming out of Bachelor degrees now are learning about these new and emerging industries so they are ready to work in the future of the energy industry.”

Sanders listed an array of skills the budding offshore industry needs, which is likely to put pressure on other industries needing them for some time.

“In essence offshore wind is a marine logistics project. You can’t put these component on land. You can’t transport a 140 metre turbine blade along a road because you cant turn a corner.

“So we are particularly in need of some pretty savvy marine engineers, and all types of engineering disciplines but in particular electrical, mechanical naval architects, and civil engineers.”

Also on her wish list are marine spatial planners to allow offshore wind to work alongside other ocean users, both human and animal, GIS mapping, ports infrastructure, operations and maintenance of wind farms and the enormous and bespoke vessels required, and workers in an onshore industry to build specialised cables and substations. around then the onshore side, cable manufacturer, cable design, substation design.

It all starts in Victoria

Victoria is ground zero for Australia’s offshore wind industry.

Australia’s offshore industry was launched in June last year when a federal legislation established the rules for how it will operate.

But Victoria was the first to the party, committing $40 million to the first three projects in late 2021 to help with planning costs and in March last year issuing offshore wind targets — at least 2 GW by 2032 and 9 GW by 2040.

The three projects to win government funding were Flotation’s Seadragon, the 2.2 GW Star of the South which will be the first offshore wind project in the country, and a project owned by Macquarie Group’s Corio.

In December the federal government formally declared the Victorian zone, where Star of the South and Seadragon are to be located, the nation’s first offshore wind development area. Some 10 GW of projects are already proposed for the zone.

The Gippsland offshore wind zone covers roughly 15,000 square kilometres offshore, running from Lakes Entrance in the east to south of Wilsons Promontory in the west, and at the time of its declaration counted more than 10GW of projects proposed for development.

Around Australia, the RenewEconomy map of proposed offshore wind operations includes 25 projects — with more on the way — and six in Victoria alone.

And while some of the technological and skills upgrades to support a national offshore industry will be applicable around the country, it’ll be Victoria where many initial lessons will be learned.

Sanders says some of the challenges they need research into are around unique species in the Bass Strait ocean such as white sharks and pygmy blue whales, as well as migratory birds. Surprisingly little is known about animal users of this airspace.

Research is also needed into the soil conditions of the Bass Strait as the calcareous soils are likely to affect the choice of foundations.

University of Melbourne Associate Professor in Spatial Information, Martin Tomko, one of the instigators of the partnership, will be working be working on sensing technologies such as Lidar, or putting sensors on drones, planes and ships to map shorelines, seabed and the structures yet to be installed.

“The Bass Strait will be like an ants nest, there will be a lot of activity there so I’m interested in tracking data,” he told RenewEconomy.

“The Bass Strait is a very different environment than anywhere else in the world. It’s quite shallow, it’s very windy, there’s lots of traffic as well. All of these have to be monitored.

“And when we talk about mapping, it’s also very fine deformations of the masts and blades and monitoring the impact of the environment on those structures, through all sorts of sensors. And the development of our methods to interpret and analyse this data in a very fast and efficient way.”