MHI Vestas Heads to The Big Easy

MHI Vestas Offshore Wind has sent two members of its executive management team to New Orleans to share the lessons learnt from over two decades of experience in erecting offshore wind farms in Europe with their American colleagues during the WINDPOWER 2016 conference organised by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

The offshore market in the US is on the cusp of introducing game-changing policy in Massachusetts and numerous states along the US East Coast are gearing up for leasing announcements, MHI Vestas said.

Flemming Ougaard, chief operating officer at MHI Vestas Offshore Wind, and Thomas Karst, the company’s chief sales officer, will us the four-day conference that started on 23 May to present at various offshore forums.

“I have been doing offshore wind projects for more than 15 years,” said Ougaard. “In the beginning, the attitude was more like “onshore on water”, but over the years offshore has definitely become its own specialty area. Dedicated personnel, doing dedicated offshore-specific tasks, on vessels specifically built for offshore wind. And of course, now we have dedicated offshore wind turbines. The industry is certainly maturing and a company like MHI Vestas has helped pioneer the industry to where it is today. I will be sharing my personal experiences in watching the evolution of the offshore wind turbine during the session “How well do turbines perform offshore? – Benefiting from the experience of Europe’s early offshore turbines” at AWEA’s annual general conference.”

Ougaard will be presenting on Wednesday, 25 May, from 15:00-15:30 local time in the Project Development & Planning Track in the “Tech Station” room.

Thomas Karst who will be presenting in the “Offshore wind in the US: Lessons learned so far from Europe’s first 11GW of offshore wind” panel. The session takes place in the Project Development Station room on Wednesday, 25 May, from 15:30-16:30.

”With over 90% of offshore installations happening in Europe, we as an industry have 11GW of experience to draw upon,” said Karst. “The USA is in a tremendously advantageous position to capitalize on the lessons learnt from projects in Europe. In the US, outlook to 2024 is led by positive policy initiatives in states such as MA and we trust that this will lead to steady growth post 2020. Large capacity projects will drive economies of scale for sustained growth on market terms and the best part is that the proven technology and capability to succeed is already in place.”