Energy Transition Now Podcast – Episode 26 “Expanding offshore wind to emerging markets”

David Linden [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, I’m your host, David Linden, the Head of Energy Transition for Westwood Global Energy Group, and you’re listening to Energy Transition Now. It feels like a little while since we’ve been recording, and that’s true, so it’s good to be back. I’m going to do things a little bit differently this time around, in that we’re going to pick a technology rather than a general theme and spend a little bit more time on that. So we get the time really to work out what’s really going on, through three or four conversations and individuals who are driving growth and innovation in that space? And the first of these, sort of mini series, as we’re calling them, is going to be in offshore wind, and to get the ball rolling, I’m very excited to have Mark Leybourne, who is the Offshore Wind Program Lead for The World Bank, here with me today. Hello, Mark.

Mark Leybourne [00:00:58] Hello, David, it’s good to be with you.

David Linden [00:01:01] Great to have you on and thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule. You’ve obviously been travelling a lot at the moment, so I hope you’re feeling like your head is in the right time zone!

Mark Leybourne [00:01:12] Just about! Jet lag is pretty much gone by now.

David Linden [00:01:16] I would suffer for much longer, so good to see you’re obviously used to it. But we’ll get to understanding why that is in just a minute. So, look, I mean, you always run out of time in these things very quickly, but it is helpful to spend a bit of time talking about context, Mark. And while The World Bank is something that’s been around, I think, I guess for a while in relative terms and people have heard about it, they might not quite fully understand what it does. Excuse me. Could you maybe just start off by explaining what is The World Bank? What’s its purpose?

Mark Leybourne [00:01:51] Absolutely. I think it’s a household name, but often people misunderstand what it is and what it does and how we do it. Certainly, I felt that when joining the bank three years ago. Essentially, we’re an international financing institution that provides finance, policy advice and technical assistance to governments of developing countries. And the main aims of the bank are really to reduce poverty, increase shared prosperity, and to promote sustainable development. So, it is quite a broad remit, but we cover the globe, as you imagine, and the focus for me and the group we work with is energy.

David Linden [00:02:31] And I guess an important phrase there is, as you say, is the developing country side of things. So, you’re not necessarily going to your kind of OECD type countries and trying to encourage things to happen there. You’re doing that in developing countries.

Mark Leybourne [00:02:45] Exactly. It’s low and middle income countries. Yeah, right.

David Linden [00:02:48] Okay. So, I guess historically, that’s an interesting point. Offshore wind has been something that’s been thought about from a different kind of profile of country. If you don’t mind me saying it in that way. So, why has The World Bank as such kind of picked offshore wind as one of its focus? Why? Why does it merit a focus of such.

Mark Leybourne [00:03:12] Yeah, you’re completely right. Offshore wind was often seen as the expensive cousin to onshore wind and restricted to development in some of these more higher income countries, like Europe. But I suppose in, around 2017 let’s say, we saw the industry really maturing and costs coming down quite quickly, becoming really affordable. And we felt that this was the right time to start thinking about its applicability for low and middle income countries. So, we looked at the resources around the world, and not just focusing on these OECD countries, we looked at all the different countries that had an offshore wind resource, and out of those we identified about 75 developing countries that have got a meaningful offshore wind resource. And these comprise, I suppose a total technical potential of about 13,000 gigawatts.

David Linden [00:04:06] Goodness, ok.

Mark Leybourne [00:04:06] So in the context, you know, we’re about 60 or 70 gigawatts now installed capacity globally. 13,000 gigawatts is a really a big opportunity, particularly when many of these countries have got much smaller installed capacity than that.

David Linden [00:04:26] Okay, So that’s 13,000 gigawatts just in these 75 developing countries.

Mark Leybourne [00:04:31] That globally, just in those 75 countries.

David Linden [00:04:36] Okay.

Mark Leybourne [00:04:37] I suppose put that in context, I think the total global technical potential is 71,000 gigawatts.

David Linden [00:04:45] Ok.

Mark Leybourne [00:04:45] Thereabouts. So, it’s a portion of that, clearly. But there’s still an incredible opportunity there for developing countries.

David Linden [00:04:53] Yes. I was going to say, I was going to ask, you know, how big is that relative to the global kind of potential? But it is still a decent enough chunk to be going after. I mean, 13,000 gigawatts is, you know, several countries.

Mark Leybourne [00:05:05] Absolutely.

David Linden [00:05:07] Supply or demand for electricity.

Mark Leybourne [00:05:11] Indeed. And perhaps just to give it a little bit more context, I suppose as the other point, the IEA and IRENA have both estimated that around 2,000 gigawatts is needed globally by 2050 to reach net zero. So, our feeling was the focus shouldn’t just be on the high income OECD type countries, because large scale renewable energy generation is also required for these low and middle income countries, and especially those with large and growing emissions. So, we formed the offshore wind development program really to start helping these countries to consider their, their resource potential and how they could go about investigating and implementing this technology.

David Linden [00:05:58] Thank you. Yeah. I mean, people often forget, or we often forget, that offshore wind is currently, I think, the fastest growing renewable on the planet. Right. They often think about solar or others, and actually, you know, it’s starting from a low base. But in a more mature setting, let’s just say it is already the fastest growing. So, I can kind of see why it will, why not elsewhere, right. They all have oceans and shores to take the opportunity of. Okay. So, tell us a little bit more about this offshore wind development program then. You mentioned it works with developing countries, etc., but how do you actually engage here? What are some of the things that you do?

Mark Leybourne [00:06:43] The program’s a partnership between ESMAP, which is the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program within The World Bank. If you think of it like, a bit like a think tank on energy for The World Bank, covering everything from clean cooking to energy storage to renewable energy, the whole range of the energy sector in partnership with the International Finance Corporation, which is the private sector arm of The World Bank Group. So, it’s important to get both The World Bank, which is the public sector side and the IFC, which is the private sector side, coming together, so we’re working as a group to cover the challenges that we’re facing. And the way the program works is we’re a global program, so we’ve got the knowledge and expertise to support the different countries that the bank works with. And our World Bank country teams have the relationship ultimately with their, and engagement with their client country governments. So we work with these teams to include offshore wind as part of the ongoing dialogue that they have on energy. And as we have these discussions, as the teams work with the governments, eventually, there’s is typically a request from those governments to have some support in offshore wind, looking at what is the opportunity there. And again, how should they go about addressing that and implementing it. And we’re starting from scratch in all of the countries that we’re working with. They’ve not thought about offshore wind before, they’re really just getting to understand what the opportunity is. So they don’t have any policies or frameworks or regulations that are in place to get offshore wind going. So really, we’re starting at that point where we’re educating and advising on building that framework to start offshore wind. And ultimately, as you’d imagine, we’re a bank, so we’re eventually hoping to provide financing to help implement these projects, whether that be on the public sector side, it could be on the infrastructure, the things like transmission grids and port investments. It could be through risk mitigation instruments to the governments, such as guarantees. So we’re trying to bring in international private financing to lower risks and lower financing costs. And then on the IFC side, on the private sector side, that could be financing the projects directly themselves, it could be financing any private sector industry. So manufacturing, the vessels the ports. So we should be able to cover the whole value chain of offshore wind, depending on what is needed within each country.

David Linden [00:09:39] Fascinating. Okay, so you’re almost like the first port of call for many of these countries. But how are you almost choosing which ones to work with though? From the kind of the 13,000 potential and many of them not having any of the as you say the basics in place to be able to make an offshore wind industry grow. That’s great, but where do you start and why?

Mark Leybourne [00:10:04] It’s a it’s a great question. So I think you need three fundamentals. One is good technical conditions. Is it windy? Is it shallow enough? Is it not too deep? There’s not too many environmental and social issues. Secondly, is there a is there a good role for offshore wind? How does it fit into the energy mix and the future country, the country’s future context for energy? And I suppose, thirdly, is there government demand? Is there a client government that is actually wanting this because we’re not here to sell them a technology, it has to make sense and they have to also want it and buy into it. So, the starting point really was looking at the terrible conditions and seeing, okay, where does this look to be most attractive for offshore wind? That’s the starting point to start having those discussions with governments when there’s an engagement and somebody says, yes, actually this is quite interesting can we can we find out more? And we slowly progress the dialogue and the analysis. And that starts, I suppose, when we start to find out what the role of offshore wind is, because it’s different in every single country. It’s not just about providing large scale renewable energy generation. It could be diversifying the energy mix, it could be filling in the gaps where hydro resources is lower. It could be providing jobs. Every country has different drivers for doing this.

David Linden [00:11:34] Okay. Might be nice to come back in a minute to some examples of each. So different countries who have got different drivers, around that. But just before we sort of leave the whole kind of the program itself and maybe look at some more examples. Within that, obviously there are a lot of corporates now looking to try and say, look, offshore wind is a key part of my strategy. There’s other associations, I guess, who have members of great diversity also, sort of going into markets and saying, hey, we should go and do something here. What would you say is your a), your distinction relative to those and then b) how would you end up working with those organisations? Because part of what I’m trying to sort of bring to light is, is how do you get involved versus others, so that people are kind of aware of your role within that.

Mark Leybourne [00:12:28] Absolutely. So, we often are working on the government side with the government’s interests in mind. But ultimately, we need these new markets to be attractive to industry. So we have to make sure that the frameworks that are in place and the opportunities is going to be attractive for developers and investors in the supply chain to come in and invest in that country. We feel it’s really important for us to share our knowledge and insights with others and vice versa. So when we’re working with institutions like GWEC or the wider industry, we’re looking at what, what is everyone seeing both on the private sector side and the government side, because they’re often very different viewpoints. And often there isn’t in these new markets that sort of dialogue between the two. So, I think it’s really important to get that message from one to the other and vice versa so that the people are actually understanding what the concerns are, what the problems are, and what some of the solutions are to this. We also [00:13:37]work with GWEC on some [1.4s] of our knowledge sharing outputs, like the key factors report we published a couple of years ago, which tried to assimilate all the different learnings from the industry that we’ve seen develop so far. And also we work with them on a lot of events, such as [00:13:55]the study tour that [0.9s] we ran in Europe last year.

David Linden [00:13:59] You mentioned just there around some of the kind of, how you work together with people to identify, you know, where are the problems and how do you think about solving some of those. If we just take, take a bit of a step back and look at either generally or feel free to use some kind of examples here to sort of paint the picture a little bit. But when you’re looking at the developing and offshore wind market and you’re going in and you’re saying there’s not much there. What are some of the biggest sort of challenge these emerging countries initially face?

Mark Leybourne [00:14:31] I suppose the first one is that, as you said, it’s a new industry and it is different to onshore wind and solar and other energy technologies that that country might have already developed. So, it’s a different mindset, different way of thinking. And I suppose the first point is to try to educate governments on that and it’s a different way to approach this. Offshore wind is complex, it’s expensive, it takes a long time and getting that understanding from the start and managing expectations I think is really important because often there’s a, can be a mismatch between what government is expecting and what the reality is. I suppose that the framework, as I said, has to be fit for purpose to attract the developers and investors. So, that’s a lot of challenges to start working with what is there already and trying to build on that adapt that, learn from the lessons we’ve seen elsewhere. Again to make these markets somewhat familiar to investors so they can be happy with it. But also, you know, be cognizant of the local context. And so we’re sticking within that local, local framework as well. And I suppose another really important point is that developing countries are very sensitive to price. And to get cost reductions, we’ve got to have large scale and that brings those cost efficiencies in, but that scale puts huge implications on the grid. Which, grid is a problem in every country and in a developing country context is just as important. But often that grid is less developed and less stable and maybe isn’t used to large scale variable renewable energy. So, it’s a new way of thinking for many of these grid operators and how they go about building up grid and managing that variation. There’s often, well there usually is a lack of supply chain. There are local supply chain opportunities I’d say in many of these countries they’ve got industry, essentially for building ships or oil and gas or even onshore wind. But there’s still nothing there really in most countries that is going to support offshore wind. And I suppose the last point I would mention is environmental and social. And whilst we’re seeing a lot of evidence building in developed countries where we’ve got offshore wind and the evidence base. In developing countries, we’ve got lots of different challenges to, that we’re going to face that we haven’t seen in other countries, whether it be species that we’ve not encountered, for instance, Dugong in Sri Lanka, how do they interact with offshore wind and what are the challenges and issues going to be? Artisanal fisheries in places like India. Very different to the commercial fisheries we see in the North Sea, and how do you engage with those communities? The third one would be indigenous coastal communities. Where in Colombia, for instance, where you’ve got communities that are particularly concerned about their cultural heritage and their local norms being disturbed by infrastructure development. These are really interesting and new challenges that we’re going to have to learn. And there are some things we can bring from established markets, but there are a lot of things that we’re going to have to start learning from, from this individual country context.

David Linden [00:18:06] Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask you if there were some sort of commonalities as such with how it’s growing up in other parts of the world and whether these sort of more emerging markets as such bring new challenges, and you’re saying there that they do bring some sort of nuances that maybe we do we do need to think about. Do you think that kind of means that, it’s going to take more time to develop an offshore wind industry elsewhere relative to other markets that, you know, I don’t know have got a fewer of these issues or maybe haven’t thought as much about these issues shall we say as well, and have not been as sensitive to them and have had obviously, you know, a decade or two now to actually deal with them. Right. This industry hasn’t sprung up overnight. It’s been a few decades in the making as such.

Mark Leybourne [00:19:00] I think there’s going to be as I said, there are lots of challenges here, too, to consider. And yes there’s definitely a risk of it taking a very long time to unravel all these issues and solve them. But, you know, there are lessons and experience that we can take from established wind markets and help that to guide the process of developing the market. Our program is, it’s objective is to accelerate the uptake of offshore wind in emerging markets. So, you know, we’re trying to provide some of those lessons learnt from these other markets and work with them in their local country context. So, we would hope that it’s not going to take much longer than we’d see in an established market, but there are always going to be surprises, I think.

David Linden [00:19:54] Okay. Okay. Let’s talk about some of those lessons from other markets, maybe in just a minute. But so far, we’ve sort of been skirting around and talked about the kind of, you know, these are all that general things, might be nice to talk about a couple of countries in particular as well. So can you maybe just sort of highlight, you know, who are you currently working with and where do you see some of that progress happening, maybe faster than other places and what that looks like?

Mark Leybourne [00:20:21] Sure. So, so far in the last four or five years, since the program’s been operating. We worked with 25 governments on offshore wind. That’s ranging from large quickly growing economies like India and Vietnam to some of the smaller island developing states like Dominican Republic and St Lucia. So, we’re covering quite a wide range of countries. And as I said, they’re all very, very different in their requirements their challenges their drivers for this. And some of the leading countries, I would say, are places like Brazil, Colombia, India and Vietnam and the Philippines. And I would say in many of these cases, we’re seeing the trend of the industry leading the push and the charge on offshore wind.

David Linden [00:21:13] Okay.

Mark Leybourne [00:21:14] Where we’re seeing developers coming into a market and coming to the government and saying, you know, we want to do offshore wind. Can you make this framework so that we can come in and invest in projects. So that pressure is essentially encouraging the government to act. And so they’re starting then to make progress on understanding the challenges that they’ve got and coming up with solutions. So typically we’ve been providing these country roadmaps. You may have seen them, we’ve published about fourth of them so far. We’ve got a few others on the way. And that’s really the starting point for us, just looking at some of the challenges and the opportunity and identifying some of the sort of important next steps for each country. But then we’re really getting into the meat of the problem in sort of the next steps. That’s really what we’re starting to do that, some of that implementation of the frameworks and the policy. And to give you some examples. So last year, both Colombia and Brazil published resolutions or decrees on offshore wind. Which are starting to set the competitive process for issuing offshore wind sites. We spent a lot of time working with both of those governments in thinking about what should be in those documents, and those agreements and getting those published. So, I suppose it’s a signal to the industry that this is a country that’s wanting to progress with offshore wind. And on India. In the last six or so months, we’ve been working very closely with the government on the tender documents that they’re coming out with for India’s first tender for offshore wind. India’s been talking about offshore wind, I suppose, for the last ten years and there’s been a big target of 30 gigawatts by 2030. And it’s been around for some time. And it’s really encouraging to see some meaningful progress being made now and documents that developers can review and opine on and give some feedback. And I hope, fingers crossed, we will see a tender coming out from India this year.

David Linden [00:23:35] Okay. Okay. You expect the same from Colombia?

Mark Leybourne [00:23:39] Colombia, I’d say is working on its tender documents. Following up from the resolution which set the overall framework for offshore wind, the competitive leasing.

David Linden [00:23:50] And the market chatter that we have is sort of Q1 next year, but we’ll see what actually happens. But. Okay. Okay. Brilliant.

Mark Leybourne [00:24:01] I suppose I could say that last week we ran a series of half day workshops with the Colombian government. To think through that resolution that came out last year. We brought together stakeholders from across government representing the Ministry of Energy, the Hydrocarbons Agency. DIMAR which is the maritime authority. ALNA so the Environment Licensing Authority, so a very broad range of government agencies to start talking about offshore wind and the challenges that they’ve got. And we spent quite some time going through all of the tasks that they need to… to think about, to put that resolution into action and to come out with some tender documents and begin that offshore wind tender. So we got into quite a lot of detail about the timeline and the actions and responsibilities. So, I think they’re in a really good place now to act on that.

David Linden [00:25:00] So, I think some markets are clearly working very much in the detail and moving things forward and others are just sort of seeing what the market wants and going from there, it seems. And one’s, as you say, quite a corporate kind of push, developers looking to try and open markets and other governments are moving things faster for different reasons. Yeah, I mean, I guess so what it says to me is, is that you’re working very hard across that well, you said 25 different governments you’ve been working with. Some of them are making it closer now during that time. So you’re seeing some of the fruits of your labour, which is great to see come through in some respects. But still, that sort of three pronged that you talked about around, you know, the technical requirement all the way down to the actual need in in-country. They all need to align before everything starts, starts to move forward. And, and so you can only do so much if that’s right, Mark, would you say? You can only do so much and then those stars a little bit do have to align, the corporates need to be interested enough, the governments need to see and understand the need etc. And you, you can obviously also provide, you know, sort of financial incentives to maybe help move some of this, or financial packages, should I say, to move some of that forward together with the IFC. But it does kind of require essentially governments to then go, yes, and then move things forward.

Mark Leybourne [00:26:25] Completely. And this won’t make sense in every single country, that there may be other technologies and other solutions that might meet their needs in the future. So, they might have a good offshore wind resource, but actually it might make more sense to do a lot more hydro or solar or onshore wind or other technologies, interconnection with other countries. So it has to, as you said, it has to make sense for that country and for that demand to be there from the government.

David Linden [00:26:56] Absolutely. And actually, you know, we see that in I don’t know, not emerging markets, but depends what you mean by emerging markets here, but in somewhere like the U.S. right now as well. Right. So that’s a market where offshore wind has been talked about for a while. Looks like it’s moving ahead. It’s also hitting a number of blockers as you go forward. And that’s for various reasons. And part of it seems to be, is this the appropriate technology that we really need at this time? Is it about jobs? Is it about, you know, the cheapest source of electricity? What’s driving that? You mentioned earlier around, you know, lessons learned from other markets or more recently emerging markets. I mean, in terms of the offshore wind space. What are some of the things that you are talking to governments about that you’ve seen elsewhere? That’s either gone really well or not as well? Maybe, right. There are lessons learnt both ways in achieving that. Is the UK, the holy grail of examples of how everything should be done and it’s perfect. You’re allowed to say no, that’s fine. Just because I live here. Or are there, clearly, you know, other parts of the world that are now starting to do things a different way. You go, okay, that makes a lot more sense for these types of markets.

Mark Leybourne [00:28:20] Yeah, I think. I’d say that no market has got it completely right. There are there are good things and bad things from every country that has done offshore wind so far. And some of those lessons are applicable to countries that we’re working with and others are less applicable, and we have to find out which of those experiences are most suited to the country context. And I think some of the commonalities are things, lessons like the first offshore wind projects are always going to be more expensive, in a new market. So there’s this immediately there’s this barrier to entry to starting offshore wind, because it is going to be expensive and it’s going to be more expensive than onshore wind and solar. And the government has to accept that and work out how to reduce that cost of energy and how to make it affordable and acceptable, to make that decision. And that’s something we’re working on at the moment through a study we’re doing on the use of concessional financing. So, it’s a lower cost financing to help reduce the cost of electricity for the first projects, because we realise that there’s all these upfront risks and barriers that are going to slow development potentially and we’d like to see those removed and progress be made. Some other sort of common themes are, you know, governments, I think, need to learn by doing. And that market has to evolve accordingly. But these governments won’t get it right the first time. Perfection is the enemy of good, you know. Sometimes you just need to say, that is good enough. And let’s just let’s move. Let’s start to learn from this experience as we progress and improve from the next round of tenders or auctions or whatever it may be. But it’s really important to have that engagement with the industry, to understand what those lessons are and to be able to improve.

David Linden [00:30:22] Yeah. There’s always that tension, though, I find, between long term certainty and iteration to create, maybe not perfection, but to start to work towards something that really works for this country, for the situation. And then, of course, the industry grows, changes, new markets come up. And it’s it is an interesting balance in offshore wind, particularly now, I find, where you’ve got constant change and people wanting also at the same time, long term clarity and security, because, of course, you know, people are wanting to underwrite their projects, they’re wanting to make investments that take maybe five, ten years to even get built right from when you first get your lease. And I think it’s just, there’s a slight difference between this industry and maybe other renewable industries. Where that length of time it takes from that first engagement all the way through to actually building and operating a wind farm, an offshore wind farm is a bit different and I guess it’s even more so uncertain in an emerging market because things will change. It naturally will change and to your point, you know, learning by doing is going to have to be part of it. So you know, that’s a natural balance that the industry as a whole I think is trying to challenge with, or sorry deal with right now. But it seems like it’s even more, I would not say extreme, but even more prevalent in emerging markets.

Mark Leybourne [00:31:49] But yeah, you’re right, it is a risk. A development of offshore wind will invariably span different administrations in a government in these countries, and it would be lovely to have that certainty of continuity across those. But as you said, that there are going to be changes. And I think the only way that continuity can be given is the industry just continues that dialogue with the government and just keeps giving the messages of, what are the challenges that facing what is going well and how does the government help them to implement projects?

David Linden [00:32:24] I don’t want to end on the negative note. In any shape or form! But, you know, it is a difficult market right now that we’re seeing across the world. And I’m talking about the mature markets in particular, right. There’s that whole discussion around cost and, you know, inflation in the market. How do you open up new markets as you’re trying to do in particular, and then working out, you know, where to place your bets? And governments almost sort of, you know, were fighting for subsidies amongst each other now, etc., etc.. And I’m just sort of trying to build a bit of a picture there, but it’s obviously not exhaustive. But if you were to take a bit of a sort of crystal ball in your mind and go, you know, from all the things that you’re talking to about, you know, with different countries around the world, what’s kind of, in your mind, the biggest risk here to this industry? Right? What’s the biggest risk to this industry? Not quite taking off, always just being localised in the North Sea and a couple of patches in North America and a couple of countries in Southeast Asia, obviously China as well in particular right now. But you know, what’s going to hold this thing back?

Mark Leybourne [00:33:38] I’d say one of the biggest ones is going to always be, the government and the frameworks and the policy, and I suppose the bureaucracy that could really slow things down. And we’d like to see things moving quickly. But often it doesn’t work like that. You often have a lot of decisions that need to be made and, policies and regulations implemented. Those can take a lot of time and they can really slow things down. And if you don’t get it right, which I said, you won’t get it right first time, but you need to get it right enough that you can get that investment coming in. If you don’t get it right, then then you can really slow things down and maybe you can stop a market altogether. And we’ve seen that in some countries where, progress has started, but actually it started on the wrong foot. I think it’s really critical to get it get right enough for that first step, deliver some projects, successfully, learn the lessons and then progress from there. And perhaps to end on a positive note… I’d say that this is a truly global industry now. We’ve deployed offshore wind in about 19 countries, I think it is to date. And I know that there are at least 20 countries that are seriously investigating or intending to develop offshore wind. So we’ve got some pretty big challenges to solve still, as you say, and this picture is constantly evolving and we’re learning and we’re working out how to do things better. But, you know, I think this is a really global industry and it’s an industrial success story. And I hope that can be brought to some of the markets that we’re working with.

David Linden [00:35:24] And I for one am excited to see this industry growing. Right. It’s coming out of its shell in some respects over the last few years and really starting to mushroom out to other countries. And it is brilliant to see the excitement around places like, well, Colombia as an example. Right. And to see the work that you guys are doing there and to then that to come out with an actual tender at the end, that’s a lot of hard yards being put in to make sure that comes to comes to the market. So, I think a lot of people are excited by that.

Mark Leybourne [00:35:54] It is and I say it’s a privilege to be in this position, and to be, I think, in the right place at the right time. And it’s not often you get to be in an industry where you are in the right place at the right time. And I think for us in the global offshore wind industry, it’s it really is an exciting time. So it’s a good place to be.

David Linden [00:36:12] Perfect. All right. Wonderful. Well, if anyone’s looking for a job, I’m sure there’s one in offshore wind out there for you. Okay, Perfect. All right. Thank you, Mark, so much again for taking the time to come on to the podcast. Lots of really good, exciting things going on and things to look forward to. You know, a lot of people look at just the next year, but the next few years there’s going to be a lot of exciting stuff coming out. So thank you for sharing that with us.

Mark Leybourne [00:36:41] No problem, David it has been a pleasure talking to you.

David Linden [00:36:43] Perfect and thanks everyone for listening as well. Hope you enjoyed it. Please make sure you subscribe. Give us a good rating and talk to you next time.

 

 

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