Oil and gas engineers transfer skills to clean energy project.
Wood Group’s people have the opportunity to share resources and apply their experience, knowledge and skills outwith their department in new areas of the business.
Since summer 2016, three engineers from London have been seconded to work on clean energy’s East Anglia ONE Wind Farm framework being developed by ScottishPower Renewables. These roles are expected to be extended for a number of years, and as the project moves closer to the construction phase, it is hoped that more colleagues from around Wood Group will be added to the team.
Lead process and procedures engineer, Alex McLaren, has been a Wood Group employee for five years and was seconded to East Anglia ONE Wind Farm in September 2016.
Alex says: “There is a strong sense that the industry is evolving. As the challenges and scale of offshore wind are up-revised, the installation and operating equipment, and procedures have to keep up. Solutions need to be worked through from scratch since there are often no tried and tested systems or methods to reference. I’m enjoying the exposure to the East Anglia ONE project in its current phase and the engagement with project requirements which comes from that.
“Professionally I’m benefitting from having the additional responsibility for establishing robust operations procedures to be triggered as assets are progressively taken over by the operations and maintenance team, and which are reliant on information gathered from across disciplines and through various stages of the design process. I am also constantly reviewing how the lessons I’ve learned in offshore oil and gas, on large-scale projects such as Shah Deniz 2, fit into the context of offshore wind.”
Brian Macdonald, clean energy implementation team leader adds: “Our belief is that there are considerable skills and knowledge which are transferable between Wood Group’s historic core oil and gas business and offshore renewables in particular. In addition to demonstrating our track record in renewables, we are able to use the core experience of the wider business as a selling point to existing and potential future customers. Having access to the company’s people and resources outiwth clean energy not only allows us to offer the customer the most suitable people, but we are able to offer more competitive rates as staff are already located locally. In a growing number of proposals, we are pulling our resources, experiences and abilities to offer customers a more comprehensive service than ever before.”