Knowledge-Transfer Webinar: Offshore Wind

Women in Wind held its first Knowledge-Transfer Webinar of the 2022 cohort of the Program on Tuesday, 26th July, 2022 on the topic of offshore wind. We were delighted to welcome Myriam Samba, Senior Business Development Manager, Blue Float Energy (pictured below) to share her insights and personal journey in the Energy industry with our program Participants in a closed-door webinar.

The webcast began with a global overview of offshore wind data, including a look at the 21.1 GW of new offshore wind installations in 2021, which was 3x more installations than 2020, making 2021 the best year for the offshore wind industry. This overview also included a market status review which revealed China led the world in annual offshore wind installations for the fourth year in a row with nearly 17 GW of new capacity 2021. Europe accounted for the majority of the remainaing new installed capacity with 3.3 GW of offshore wind capacity added in 2021.  

The presentation then continued with Myriam discussing her experience in the energy sector including her transition from the oil & gas sector to offshore wind, before transitioning towards giving an overview of the offshore wind sector, advantages and disadvantages, and key differentiators of floating wind

Some of the insights include:

• Offshore wind holds a great promise for decarbonizing economies quickly and at scale
• Offshore wind enables countries to take full advantage of the abundant wind resource while revitalizing coastal communities and placing energy production in close proximity to consumption centers.
• Given that offshore wind can be deployed at scale and relatively quickly compared to other large scale energy production facilities, it has been widely recognized as a gamechanger in the clean energy transition and the key to enabling decarbonization trajectories compliant with the Paris Agreement. 
• Offshore wind unlocks the full potential of the world’s energy resources, by providing access to transitional and deep-water offshore wind sites that were previously inaccessible.

There was a steady stream of questions and comments throughout the webinar. Attendees asked about industry-wide approaches to offshore wind project challenges, such as operational and environmental challenges, and whether some of these challenges could be approached collectively rather than by individual companies. There were many queries about technology application, concerning resilience of materials in a harsh offshore environment, turbines in areas with maximum tip heights and ways to drive LCOE down further.

This was a highly engaging and interactive session to kick off our series of Knowledge-Transfer Webinars this year!