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The Ocean, The Crown & The Hidden Story of Offshore Wind Energy! | Fully Charged Show Podcast
00:48:58
In this episode of the Fully Charged Show Podcast, we dive into The Crown Estate's pivotal role in the UK’s renewable energy transition. As custodians of the seabed surrounding England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, they’re powering 11 million...
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- [00:00]
Host
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Fully Charged show podcast, where today we've come to London to film this very special episode in person. Because today we're talking all things offshore wind energy. Now, as you may know, the UK is absolutely ripe for offshore wind energy, and that's why it represents over 30% of our annual electricity generation. But I bet you've never stopped to think who actually owns the seabed. And no, it's not the remit of some mystical sea creature. It is, in fact, the responsibility of the Crown Estate. So, very shortly, I'm going to be joined by Gus Jasper, managing Director for Marine for the Crown Estate, who's going to be sharing a little bit more information about the Crown Estate, talking about how we could accelerate the deployment of offshore wind energy, how problematic grid connections are anyway, and how we need to think about biodiversity in all of this as well. But first, a very quick note from our sponsors.
- [00:49]
Sponsor
This episode of the Fully Charged podcast is brought to you by OVO's Charge Anywhere. Charge Anywhere helps you power your car wherever you are, plan your route and pay. You'll have access to over 34,000 chargers across the UK's largest charging networks and more than 400,000 chargers across Europe. Setup is easy. Just download the OVO Charge app, create your account, add payment details, hit the road and start charging. There's no need to be an OVO customer. Either simply pay as you go or benefit from up to 15% off your charging with monthly boost packages. OVOS Charge Anywhere power your next journey with peace of mind.
- [01:33]
Host
So, for those who might not be aware, could you kick us off by describing exactly what is the Crown Estate and then perhaps how the Crown Estate relates to offshore wind energy?
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Gus Jasper
Yeah, definitely. So in simplest terms, the Crown Estate is essentially the nation's company. And what I mean by that is we hold a whole host of assets on behalf of the nation. Nation in the uk, we operate across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And that includes assets ranging from the heart of London and keeping London one of the most vibrant, thriving cities in the world, through to one of the nation's largest landowners. So we have rural estates, about 200,000 acres across the country. We also have a regional portfolio across cities and towns of property across the country. And then we have the seabed, and we hold that on behalf of the nation. And what I mean by that is, essentially, how do we develop the seabed in a way that is sustainable for the long term, whilst we draw the value that we need from it, particularly for the energy transition? I can talk more about what we do with that. But essentially all offshore energy starts with the seabed and it starts with how do you build something out at sea that has a connection onto the seabed?
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Host
Why?
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Gus Jasper
For donation is because we are an independent company, Crown Estate, we operate independently, but we return all of our profit back to the Treasury. So every bit of profit we make, we do it with a lens, both what we can make now, but also what we deliver for the long term. So how do we drive sustainable development whilst we make money? Last year we returned over a billion pound of profit to the nation's Treasury.
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Host
So one of the things we hear all the time is that the UK seabed is absolutely ripe for offshore wind. Why is it such a ripe space for offshore wind?
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Gus Jasper
Simply stand on a beach, it's pretty windy anywhere you go across Britain. Take that out, 50, 60, even further miles, it's even windier. Take that up, it's even, even windier. So we've got some amazing geography in Britain which gives us a real platform for offshore wind. Also, we've got largely shallow seas to the off our east coast. Again, gives us a fantastic potential as well. And we have used that. We've got now the second largest fleet of offshore wind in the world, developed over the last 25 years. We've got almost as much as the whole of Europe combined. Spectre.
- [03:52]
Host
It's phenomenal.
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Gus Jasper
It's phenomenal. So it's a huge UK success story if you think about it. We've got Today, probably about 11, 12 million homes are running offshore wind. We're aiming to power up to 50% of the whole country through for offshore wind. But it's not just offshore wind. We've also got incredible geography in a way, for carbon capture, for other types of energy across our seabed as well. So we start with a head start. The trick that we have to do is how do we use that head start to then get the most value for the nation? So value for driving energy quickly, but also doing it in a way that protects our environment, that grows jobs and skills across the country and makes sure that we keep the UK a really attractive investment proposition for domestic or international investors.
- [04:39]
Host
So just as a bit of a stock take to see where we are now, because as you described, we've got 11 to 12 million homes in the UK currently being powered by wind power, which is. Which is an astonishing number in itself, particularly because I think there are 24 million dwellings in the UK, so a pretty sizable fraction. I also read that there's a lot of capacity that hasn't yet come online. It's sort of been dedicated but it hasn't yet come online. So where are we in terms of amount that exists, amount that is in the pipeline and amount that we still need to reach net zero by 2030?
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Gus Jasper
Yes, really good question. So in a way we talk about operational, so spinning today, or I should say spinning depending how windy it is. But spinning today is about 14 to 15 gigawatts of power. In simple terms, think a gigawatt is roughly a million homes. It's slightly less, but in simple terms it's about 1 gigawatt is 1 million homes. We then have a pipeline that is over 90 gigawatts of power across the UK as a whole. But that includes projects that may not come to fruition because we know that these are major, major infrastructure projects. Not all of them will necessarily come through and there's some challenges on those. We can talk a bit more about some of those, but we know we've got to go even further. So to hit our ambitions by 2030, the NISO, the nation's the National Energy System operator, just put out their range of scenarios which requires between about 45 to 50 gigawatts of offshore wind to come onto the nation's power system by 2030. So that's if you take the sort of what's operational now, we've got a tripling of that by 2030 in the next six years. So it's taken 25 years to get to here, got six years to triple it. That's a huge challenge. But we don't stop there. If we go further, we know that electricity demand is only going to rise. We know we've got to get off hydrocarbons, oil and gas in our, we got off coal last month, I think shut nation, shut the last coal powered fire station. But as we see the transition from one energy, we see the demand rise on electricity. The projections are if we plan ahead to 2050, we're going to need about 120, 120 plus gigawatts. So this demand is going to rise, you know, nine, ten fold over the long term.
- [06:57]
Host
That must be quite an intimidating thing because I can imagine when you're, you know, you come into work and you think okay, we're doing pretty well. 11 million homes, that's pretty good. We need to triple that in six years. Oh and by the way, we maybe need 120 gigawatts plus by 2030. And we're going to get into some of the challenges. But I guess the sort of the top question is, do you think it's possible?
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Gus Jasper
So, yes, I wouldn't be here if I didn't, is the short answer. Is it hard also?
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Sponsor
Yes.
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Gus Jasper
You know, we've got to do, as I said, you know, double or triple compared to 25 years. And also what we see is the seabed's getting busier every single day. So I sometimes describe it. I can talk later. We're working on what we call a marine delivery route map. I sometimes describe it like we're playing the world's hardest game of Tetris, where people stand on a beach and they think, oh, it's amazing. The sea is so empty and it's pristine. We know that it's really, really full. So we manage the seabed across multiple different sectors, where we're not just thinking offshore wind, we're also thinking about how do we restore nature at the same time. So we've had a massive decline in the UK's biodiversity of its seas. For example, over 90% of our native oysters gone, over 90% of our seagrass. All of these things critical to our ecosystem. At the same time, we've got potentially a tripling of the amount of cables coming into the uk. If you think of the data demand, we've got carbon capture and the potential for carbon capture on our seabed as well, where we've currently got developments that could get about 10 to 20 million tonnes of carbon captured from our Smith, to put that perspective, that's about 10% of the UK's slightly less, but about 8 to 10% of the UK's current carbon output could be captured under our seabed. All of these demands growing, everybody's saying, go faster, whilst we've also got all the other sectors to think about whether that's transport, fishing, defense as well. So this game of Tetris, all these demands are flying in the whole time. And our role part of that is actually to fit that into a coherent forward plan. And we believe that can be done. But it requires a lot of planning, a lot of thinking and working across different sectors to get out of it.
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Host
And, you know, I think that has been the thing that's become so acutely evident to me in researching this podcast, is that the number of different stakeholders that you're having to deal with, so not least just the ones that you've described there in terms of managing the seabed, but also other people who are in the energy ecosystem, shall we say? So you mentioned NISO already. So that's the National Energy Systems operator. Yes, but then we've also got ofgem, we've got GB Energy. I wonder if you could just sort of describe the who's who and how you sort of relate to each other.
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Gus Jasper
So it's a bit like acronym bingo, isn't it? We're going to play but essentially it's kind of easiest to think about the different segments. You've got a number of regulators, you know who either and well, first off we've obviously got government and government set. In the end, electricity is a regulated market in terms of the, the price that comes out. So our role, we do the first part of it. So when we lease seabed and we do an arrangement with woo developer, an energy company and we will do those openly and we tender, we get in the best food out and we. Then they will bid for that often, well always they'll bid for it but it's a mixture of price and then we also will be asking questions about value, environmental and social. They'll be doing through that. And then at the end point you have what's called the offtake agreement or a cfd, a contract for difference which is set by government managed by first acronym, the lccc, the low carbon contracts company who managed in the contract for the price at the end essentially for offtake we manage the seabed and the development of the wind farm with the developer through that then you have a whole host of different players. You have Nisso as you mentioned, who essentially are doing the strategic plan for energy. Now they're relatively new but strategic plan for the grid system and how they plan that out. So we work very closely with them and we just signed a statement of intent with them a while back to say we've got to plan generation and grid connection together, particularly when it comes to offshore. So for example, alive at the moment developing a what will be one of the world's biggest floating wind farms. So these are essentially wind farms that float, float on top of the sea fully they're anchored to the bottom of the sea but float on a platform above, you know, out, further out at sea means you can go bigger, you can go further out. They are about as high as the shard tower. That's the height of these floating wind turbines. And then this is the first development where we'll have the grid design and rough timescale alongside the taking them to market as well to solve that problem of grid and generation connection. But then you mentioned you've also got OFGEM in terms of regulating the whole system and some of the price controls as well around that. But then crucially you've got a whole host of other stakeholders who are in the regulatory box who are part of the chain for developing energy. So the SNCBs, the statutory nature conservation bodies, whether it's Natural England, whether it's NRW in Wales, a whole host of, sorry, Natural Resources Wales acronyms again, who will be critical to the chain of. How do you, how do you develop. One of the core things we have is as the kind of underpinning of all of it, nothing happens until you've got some a site essentially to develop is how do we align all of those stakeholders up front? Because at the moment what you have in the UK system for energy generation or particularly offshore is you have essentially a pass to baton approach. Yeah, you know, you get a bit of seabed, you then go and get your, try and get your surveys, you then go and agree your consenting with some of the nature, the SNCBs or the consenting bodies, you then go and try and get your grid, you then go and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and it goes on. And what that means is it's getting longer, it's getting longer and it's getting harder to develop when we know we've got to go faster and we've got to make it easier to develop. So what we're doing is trying to align a lot of those issues upfront. How do we do a plan for all of the stakeholders together through what we call our marine delivery route map. And then that means we can move faster when it comes to actually somebody wanting to build and develop a wind farm.
- [13:19]
Host
Because I think that's one of the things that's really surprised me is that I've been reading obviously that there's the marine delivery roadmap. Marine delivery route, sorry, that you have been developing. There's also this spatial strategic energy. I'm going to check my notes.
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Gus Jasper
Strategic spatial energy plan, that's the one from NISO.
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Host
And then they've also been doing their CP30, their Clean Power 30 scenarios. And it feels to me that they obviously all connect to each other. You're thinking about like well, okay, what is the space that exists? How do we need to plan for that space? How do we kind of move from a passing the baton towards a much more sort of holistic and integrated approach. But it also seems kind of phenomenal to me that this didn't exist until now. So has it been a case of. Well, it's been sort of figuring out how we need to deploy wind energy and now it's become that much more urgent to deploy some of these things or what's happened there?
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Gus Jasper
Yeah, it's a fair question. So I think some of the drivers, I mean, partly necessity drives change. So we've done very, very well in the uk. As I said before, we're one of the world's leading countries in terms of the energy transition and that's fantastic. But we haven't had to face into some of the harder choices today. First off, the first few years we had largely to just take offshore wind. The UK developing, but not much competition internationally, whereas we now have pretty much every other country also wants to drive their energy transition as fast. So are we going to be the most attractive country for global investment into renewable energy for supply chains when there's a crunch in terms of capacity, are we going to make it the place that people want to come and invest and develop? Secondly, we've had markets moving through various different stages of development, not just offshore wind, but carbon capture is now starting. We've seen other energy, whether it's wave or tidal starting more nascent as well. Hydrogen, the potential is still again quite nascent, but potentially could grow. And we haven't had to think so hard about all the other sectors because we've had the space to do it, at least offshore. Third is we've now set a really ambitious target in terms of both clean power by 2030, but then also net zero beyond that. And crucially, a point often make is the world doesn't stop in 2030. Now it's a nice day because everyone can kind of visualize it, but we're going to need to switch the lights on in 2031 and 2032 and actually our demand is going to grow in 1, 2, 34, 35, etc. And on.
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Host
So.
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Gus Jasper
So how do we keep on a plan going forward? So I think those three things come together as well as there's been changes to create niso, to create legislations going through on great British energy, et cetera, which really leads us to say, the time for sort of a project by project approach where every project kind of develops and then tries to solve all of its systems. After that, all strategic issues switches to now. We need to look at a whole system approach and the three sort of areas you mentioned, our route map, the Clean Power Plan and NISO really align to say how do we create a route map for the sea space? Because that's one of our most crucial national assets we have. It's where we're going to get the bulk of our power under any scenario. So how do we develop a route map for that? It's also how you start to determine the investment choices onshore, where will landings happen, where the ports need to be developed, where could supply chain start so we can start to kickstarter a national regeneration as well through that with then how are we going to connect all of this? And that's across the whole of the country, not just offshore, but Also onshore, through NISO's SSEP, the strategic spatial Energy Plan. And then with now the very hard Drive to 2030. And in a way the 2030 thing, what it does is helps us really focus, solve those strategic issues now, get us all aligned so that we can keep on delivering from there. So I'm always an optimist. It's not easy, but it does come together at the moment as a good proposition.
- [17:19]
Host
As I'm hearing you talk, I always wonder what it must be like to actually work in various organizations that we go into and where we speak to people who work there. I think, what is it that you sit down and do each day? I almost imagine you sort of sitting in front of a map of the UK and thinking, this is quite complicated. But it's, it's absolutely amazing to think of all of these different stakeholders having to have such a coordinated approach if this huge ramp up that's required is actually going to come off. And one of my questions was going to be, because we're now In Leasing Round 5, I understand that that's a live round, so you won't be able to share too many details about it. But my question was going to be what's changed between leasing Round one and leasing Round five? And I suppose a lot of it is, well, it's gone from that very kind of linear project by project approach to needing this much more sophisticated coordinated approach. Have there been any other things that you've observed?
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Gus Jasper
Yeah, sure. So from the first leasing round through to now leasing Round five and we're already thinking about, so in my day job, also thinking about round six and what will be round seven and the future of offshore wind, we can talk a bit more about that, but we target in a way, how do we help develop the right proposition for the industry at that point. So leasing Round one was very much about helping to develop an industry to sort of grow and test, you know, and then building up through to commercial scale and then into what Round four was, which is a very, so very commercial scaled opportunity with big players coming in to develop Significant amount of gigawatts all at once. And then round five. Now, round five has some differences. First off, it's in the new part of the country, so the Celtic Sea. So that is for those not familiar with UK waters, that's just off the coast of Wales and, and going down Devon and Cornwall coast. So a sort of chunk out, a V shape out from there. Importantly, though, it's on the west coast, so it's on the windy west. So we capture the wind from the east through most of where our fleet, the wind farms are at the moment, also on the west, giving us greater energy security in terms of wind flows, but also opening up whole new areas of capability. It's deeper. So it's. At the moment we talk about fixed bottom wind. So there's essentially turbines drilled in or fixed into the bottom of the seabed. They can go only to about 60 meters. Ish. As we go further out, we get into floating wind technology. The crucial thing for the UK is most of the world's probably going to need floating wind in the future. We've been blessed with this shallow seabed off the east coast of the uk, so we can actually develop a technology that can be a massive global leader and we can lead the next stage of offshore wind. So all of that we take into account when we design the leasing route, new area, deeper, new technology, trying to get to market quickly so the UK can prove it's got the scale to then show the world what can be done on it. And also, crucially, it's an area where there's potential for huge regeneration. If you think of the economic transition around southwest Wales, for example, and, you know, historically, mining largely, lots of the mining and coal mines largely gone. Looking at the steel transition, etc. And also into Devon and Cornwall, the opportunity to do something quite, quite magical there. So that comes to how do we design these around? So you're taking in all these different factors. So. And the crucial point there is it's not just about the gig watts. You know, if it was just developing gigawatts, it might be easy, but it would be easier actually. It's about developing gigawatts at the right price, at the right time, in the right place, and delivering the right benefits locally as well. So for this leasing round, we've done something a bit different. What we've done is brought a lot of the. What are normally the kind of systems issues, we brought them up front. So first off, we agreed the space with lots of the core stakeholders in that area. We then undertook what we call, it's called an hma, the Habitats Regulation Assessment. This is the environmental assessment. Normally a developer would do that at the end or after the process. We did that up front to clear the environmental issues. We then conducted surveys ourselves. So again, normally a developer would do them, each project doing their own. We said, actually, let's do this collectively, let's do this across the space. So environmental surveys, everything from planes and ships going out, as well as technical surveys of the seabed to assess the condition of it. And then crucially, we have been working with NISO to design the grid as well, and where the grid will land and the capability of the grid and the target dates for grid as well. So you essentially get projects that are more ready to go by the time that people invest in knowing because of the new technology of floating wind, developers are going to have to focus on really scaling up that new technology. Then we've also done some other things in this round, which is different, where we've also said to get the full benefits, we should look really hard at how we drive social value, as we call it, and how we drive environmental value. So we said as part of this, without going too techie on the tender, but essentially there's two stages. There's a stage up front where developers, before they can even offer us money for a bidding process, they have to first prove how they're going to deliver environmental benefits and they commit to a range of social value commitments as well. Those can be things like how many apprenticeships they're going to take on, how many people not in education, employment or training, how many skills. And they also say what ports they plan to use as well. So those ports get an early signal to start the investments as well. That's live, so I can't talk about more of it, but it's all about getting some earlier development principles going, which then lead to sort of faster development, but also wider benefits in the. In the communities around the Celtic Sea.
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Host
This is. This is pretty exciting. I mean, there's a number of things that you've mentioned in there that I'm sure are going to get a number of our people in the audience especially excited. You've mentioned floating wind. They're kind of having a much more strategic, coordinated approach and also the secondary benefits that can be experienced by local communities. But I want to jump back a second before we go into some of those, because one of the things that I've seen is that there was it leasing round four, there was one leasing round in particular which perhaps didn't go entirely to plan. And I think it's worth mentioning that at that time there was really high inflation. The cost of delivering those wind farms was not necessarily the most economically compelling thing to do. Has that been resolved? And why was it that that particular leasing round was so challenging?
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Gus Jasper
So just first off, there's a difference between a leasing round and an allocation round or the auction round, which is probably worth explaining to viewers. So there is what we call unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, but unfortunately they follow the same numerical path but aren't linked. So when we talk a leasing round, that is when we bring seabed to market for developing in this case wind farms. But it could be other areas, but those are leasing rounds, for example, 1, 2, 3, 4. We're now on leasing round five. And then you have what's called the allocation round which is the government essentially setting a budget for the strike price. So through the cfd, the contract for difference of how much they will pay for electricity, developers then bid in essentially to that level and that gives them. The CFD operates by essentially hedging a certain amount for, for the developers, they now have Certainty over a 15 year period of what price they're going to get because the price could go up in the market or it could go down, but they know they're going to get a set price to allow them to do these big billion pound investments. So there was allocation round five was the one that had no bids in from developers. In terms of the CFD side of things, we've never had a problem in our leasing round. We've always had developers come on three days. In fact, actually round four, we're seeing those developments progress really, really fast as well into operational power. In fairness to the government, they listened, they recognized it. I can't speak for them, but they did in fairness come out quite quickly. This new government has come out with a new budget and a new sort of approach for setting essentially the strike price. And we have seen now developers rebid in and, and get significant projects back on track.
- [25:44]
Host
I'm really glad I asked that question because I was like, okay, I think I've understood who's who. I think I've understand how these things work. Clearly I hadn't and I think if I had got confused then definitely our audience would as well.
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Gus Jasper
It's no problem. There's never a day I don't find a new acronym or new sort of bit of the system as well. So you're not the only one.
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Host
But I want to ask you about floating wind because this has Been something that we wanted to cover on the fully charged and everything electric show for the past few years. And I think since I joined the company, which was in 2021, we've been like, okay, can we go and find one? What kind of stage of development are they at? Is it ready to go and see something? So presumably with a leasing round, you know, there's a number of things that have to happen before something is actually built in situ. So I imagine there's a degree of predicting what the technology will be doing in say a year to five years time. But how ready, how viable is floating wind at this point in time?
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Gus Jasper
Yeah, so it works simply. I mean there's, there's test. Well, they actually no longer test really, but they've been up for a while. There's this turbine spinning and floating as well. Two critical things. It's good news. UK's got actually one of the largest developments up in kindergarten up in Scotland. And so they work. Essentially the big question is, can we scale them commercially? You know, can they work and can they then be a long commercial proposition? And fundamentally yes, they can. And that's why we're confident in taking forward, moving to the next stage. So we are developing or putting into the market at the Moment what are 1.5 gigawatt size wind farms? So three of them in the Celtic Sea, totaling four and a half gigawatts. So that's a significant scale development. That's why we deliberately geared it to sort of give the developers more of the certainty upfront about those issues, because we know there's that scaling up focus. But yes, the technology works, there's still innovation. And one of the amazing things about the offshore wind industry is it innovates really fast. And we've seen that both in terms of costs coming down on offshore wind, but also in terms of bigger turbines coming out, seeing the technology for floating windows changing, but it's a, it's a proposition that works. And so we're really excited about getting this going. And UK being one of the leaders, South Korea is also pushing forward with it. But the UK being one of the global leaders for floating wind, it's very.
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Host
Exciting and I'm especially excited for a day that we can go and do an episode on floating wind and actually get out on a boat and see these structures in action. Because I think until you've got up close to a wind turbine, it's so difficult to realize just how huge and impressive and actually majestic they are as sort of pieces of technology as well. But that does make me ask a question of if you compare leasing round one to leasing round five, presumably the leasing round one, those leases are going to come to the end of their life at some point, at which point also the technology has moved on to some degree. So A, what happens in terms of those sort of renegotiating those leasing agreements and B, is it likely that those wind turbines will be upgraded for the latest and greatest technology?
- [28:52]
Gus Jasper
Yeah, really good question. So it's that point of the cycle where we're coming to the end of life for some of the first turbines. So we're now looking at repowering. Now whether that is repowering by keeping those turbines spinning longer or whether that's repowering through essentially using the sites for new turbines to go in and the growth of the turbines. Turbines are now up to 15 megawatts, 20 megawatt, 50 megawatt is key one being used in some of the new developments. Now that's massive and a massive growth over the years. So that's a very live question. We're working that through. We're also looking at. We have a program around what we call capacity increases. So where we've got existing wind farms, but we've now learnt what you can fit in those wind farms, so ones that were from previous rounds that we may be able to put more Windows turbines in as well. So you increase also the density potentially of the turbine layout as that goes forward. So we've got two core things which could also help. That said, we know we still need to bring new seabed to the market and develop further. So we launched a couple of months ago an engagement exercise out to the market looking at another 20 to 30 gigawatts. So that's talked about earlier. That's a huge amount. That's doubling kind of what we've got at the moment operational. And we talked about how we bring that forward, roughly where we might bring that forward to start that engagement with stakeholders, everyone from Sydney Elm fishing industry who you know, rightly will look at, look at things and think what does this mean for us? How do we engage? We do a lot of active engagement to work through their concerns, thinking about environmental, how do we fit that in and prioritize nature as well. And then what's the model? How much pre development work should we do ourselves and potentially also in partnership with Great British Energy to develop the sites as much as possible for when they go to market. But there's lots of interesting bits around that.
- [30:46]
Host
So given that you're having to in particular Think about fishing, industry, marine conservation and restoration. Is there enough space for all of this capacity?
- [30:56]
Gus Jasper
So, yes, it does require really hard thinking and evidence or collecting lots of different evidence around it. So personally, I believe it can be done. It can't be done if it's a first come, first served, or who shouts loudest, or a we'll build and we'll try and mitigate afterwards. And we've seen those approaches, I believe, have hit the end of the road. Now, we've had some success through moving through that cycle, but we've hit that end point. Hence why we're saying we must now develop this marine delivery route map in partnership with all the other acronyms we talked about, but in particularly niso's ssep and then crucially, I spent a lot of my time talking to nature bodies. We must have a nature restoration plan for our sea that is as ambitious as our energy plan. Because if we're going to increase the amount of infrastructure in the sea by up to. It could be up to eight to 10 times. We've got to have a nature plan because otherwise we're going to see nature decline. We can see all the benefits of our drive towards net zero, get knocked back by a biodiversity crisis and. Or we'll also see everybody just fighting it out nonstop at the back end through consenting and we end up with a negative mitigation space. So it can be done, but it requires, in a way, lots of people to flip out of their own sector for a day. I spend my days kind of working across every sector and trying to think about that, to flip out our own set, to bring the best evidence and to think about where we're going in the long term. What does this mean for each different industry? How do we then plan? We started to map the seabed down to. We sort of describe it a bit like a postcode for the seabed. So we run properties around the country. We know a property, we're in central London at the moment. We're sitting in St. James, which, for those who don't know, it's a very nice part of central London. We also own properties in other places in the country which are also beautiful and wonderful. But we know the value of those are different, the value of those for different purposes, whether that's what people pay for rent, you know, or the value for what this means for certain economies, is very different to a property here and a property elsewhere. So we start to take that approach out to seabed mapping one square kilometre by one square kilometre, all of the different uses of seabed. So the lcoe, the levelized cost of energy, how much if you're going to put something there, other uses that it could be in that space, whether that's carbon use, carbon capture, etc. Thinking about value for fishing, for transport, for thinking about environmental value as well, to create essentially a postcode map of the seabed for the first time. So we can make those choices about what goes where, fit in all of the areas, work out where we may be able to drive co location. So we're doing a lot of work for can you get offshore wind farms on top of carbon capture sites and with can you get aquaculture, so growing for example seaweed or fishing around wind farms, etc. To then narrow down those choices of where there may be conflict. And as you do that, you start to realize if we properly plan forward, actually the conflict can be minimized and then we can achieve what we, what we all need.
- [34:07]
Host
I mean it makes so much sense when you, when you say it out loud and you kind of line it out in those terms. But I've never even stopped to think that different bits of seabed would have different values in the same way that a different postcode may ascribe different value. But it does make me think that we've seen quite a lot of rhetoric in the news about locational pricing. And I think, you know, there's a lot of discussion ongoing at this, at this point in time and I guess this is the idea that depending on where you live in the country, depending on your proximity to renewable energy, that would determine the cost you pay for electricity. When you're having to price the seabed, are you also having to project into a future where there may be locational pricing? How does that bit of the puzzle work?
- [34:47]
Gus Jasper
It's a good question. So at the moment we price it largely on the cost of the transmission, obviously the development of, so how difficult is it to develop in that site and then largely the cost of the transmission cables, simply put, not because we can only do things on what we know, if that makes sense. There's an interesting question around it. The other factor though, obviously is you get where we are essentially going with our energy production or generation at sea is in a way the sort of easier spaces have largely gone. We're not sitting here thinking, you know, there's this map and there's lots of top places that we could just go to which are going to be hit that sweet spot of environmentally wonderful, cheap, you know, 100% community supported, etc. So we're having to look further out, both on the northeast of UK's waters and then into the southwest of our waters. That also adds a price dimension because the further out you go, potentially you lower the risk of having issues when you build, but you potentially raise the cost as well. So it's a complex. It's a complex matrix.
- [35:54]
Host
Oh, you've just added another dimension. Oh, my gosh, I'm so glad I don't do a job. It's extremely complicated and fun. And fun. And very important that we should say as well. So something you mentioned earlier on is the opportunities that can be afforded to local communities who live in proximity to wind turbines. And I wonder if you could describe some of those secondary benefits that deploying offshore wind can bring.
- [36:16]
Gus Jasper
Yeah. So, I mean, a big thing is not just offshore wind, actually, but our energy transition, I firmly believe is not just an energy transition. You know, it's great. We're going to have cheaper. It is cheaper, greener power. That's fantastic. Right. We're all happy, but it's really noticeable. I was talking about this. I did a speech on the day when the UK's last coal power station shut or stopped providing services into the grid. But it was also the same time frame. 40 years on from the miners strike. This year has combined over the last 12 months has combined that sort of two really important moments for the nation. And so you think about it, when we do this energy transition, can we also do a national regeneration? So that's what really, really drives me and that's what's really exciting thing. It'd be wonderful. We can look out more. Powered by feel good gigawatts, but also the potential for jobs creation, for new skills, for revitalizing areas where the heart of industry has gone. Some of the hope has gone out of those areas is amazing. And when I travel around the country looking at those, that's what really, really gets exciting. So when we look at some of the developments, talking about the Celtic Sea, we did a report out looking at the first phase of development. Could be over 5,000 jobs in the area. Just to get the first phase of the development going, we believe the workforce could grow massively. It's currently about 30,000 in offshore wind in the UK at the moment. That could triple over the coming years as well. So you think of what that can do into each of the economies. We've started ourselves at the Crown Estate, also at a really exciting time because we've currently got going through, we're governed by an act of Parliament for Those who don't know us, a 1961 act of Parliament hasn't been updated since 1961 and don't need to tell any on the world's changed quite a lot since 1961. And so currently going through Parliament is an act to update our powers to allow us to essentially be a more modern company in the sense of how we can use our money. And at the moment we can't borrow and we can only invest in certain things. So we're going to get subject to Parliament we're going through at the moment, but the aim is to be able to then use our borrowing ability and our investment powers to be able to drive investments in, to help that regeneration opportunity even more. Not just in the energy space, also in our property side of things as well across the country, but from my side being able to invest in infrastructure, whether that's looking at some of the supply chain opportunities as well to really create new jobs. And we've just put out over the next few months, these will come through the first phase of some funding for what we call a supply chain accelerator. So we've used some of our capital to start saying the UK's got huge offshore wind industry and a huge potential across energy more broadly offshore, but doesn't have the strongest supply chain. And how do we start to bridge that gap and how do we get companies to be able to scale up, to get more contract ready? So we launched this supply chain accelerator. We'll be giving out investments into various different companies to help them scale up and get ready for the transition.
- [39:36]
Host
So what bits are currently missing from our wind supply chain in the uk?
- [39:40]
Gus Jasper
So, I mean, there's a global crunch as well. Risk of a global crunch, I should say. But essentially we have right across system, everything has got to scale up dramatically. So do we have enough transmission cables? That's hvdc key HVDC cables looking through to turbines, towers, et cetera. So all the way across it. So there's a set of the kind of core components, areas, which is that's a competitive global market and we need to be making sure that we are getting as much share as we can. But also I'm keen to see how part of our route map the idea of this is to give that forward visibility. So if you're a factory and you're thinking, I want to go and build a new. We know there's more demand, do I build it in. Actually, I won't pick any country, but country, yes, another country, another country or do I build it in the uk, you know, part of that, there's a whole host of factors, but one of the things we aim to do is to say it's not just about what you're building for now. We can show you the pipeline of future orders that you may get as well, because we can set out up to 2050, you know, showing there'll be another 2030 gigawatts coming to market by 2030 and this is when it's going to come through. So you can start to plan and invest for the long term. So getting the supply chain a core sort of parts of it. But then also the UK has an infrastructure gap as well. So even if you had all of the supply chain there, we don't have sufficient port capability, for example. So in the Celtic Sea I was talking about deliberately we're incentivizing the ports or the developers to start connections with the ports early on to start those build outs as well. So how do we target some of the core infrastructure as well to. To enable the UK to be able to service, to assemble, to integrate, to build, etc. Offshore? That's going to be really critical because it's a shift of our nature of many of our ports, which many of them have been import previously into now, actually turning into build and servicing ports for our offshore industries. And then the third core block is skills. And we've done a lot of work. We did a partnership last year with R UK, the UK's renewable trade body, to look at how do we build A and crown state Scotland, I should say as well, how do we start to target the core areas of the UK supply chain? It's called Industrial Growth Plan, it's public, if anyone wants to look at it. And it sets out the core areas where we have gaps in the market. But skills is one of those. And how do we start to develop the core sort of pipelines of skills? We've done some things on that as well and everything from investing in a training college, for example, we've opened up a course in Falmouth down in the southwest of England, through to trying to get young people really excited about this energy transition. So we partnered with Microsoft to create a Minecraft world of developing a wind farm. So as a young kid, you can go on, you can build your wind farm, but you also get to realize how difficult it is to work out the spatial issues, how if you don't get enough capacity, the lights in your city is going to go off, how do you plan and manage the environmental factors, et cetera, as well to Try and grow those future engineers and future.
- [42:57]
Host
Runners of our do you know, I have to say, I think it is such an ingenious idea to have this Minecraft world in which you need to build a wind turbine because. And we were chatting before the podcast started that I was telling you that I recently my husband tried to get me to play football manager. And I played it for a bit and I thought, okay, I can understand what's happening here. But I was like, it's basically emails and giving, you know, an inspirational talk and setting training sessions. I was like, it is basically work. But actually I would, if that's the sort of game that I was going to play, I'd be far more interested in doing this for a wind turbine where actually you're having to sort of factor all of these different things. So I think this should be. We should start the campaign that wind turbine manager should be the new football manager.
- [43:38]
Gus Jasper
I agree with that.
- [43:38]
Host
Yes. And then we have lots more people wanting to work in the world of wind turbines and football. Both very important, I should say both, you know, both very core tenets of the uk. Okay, I want to ask, I want to jump back for a second because I think it's really clear that, you know, you've had this experience for, well, the crown estate has had experience the past 25 years looking how the wind industry needs to evolve such that it can do this rapid scale up that we now need to see. And all the ways we've spoken about having it that really, really coordinated plan so that things don't have that past the baton approach. But there is an existing challenge with grid bottlenecks and that wind turbines have been built, other renewable energy projects have also been built and they're not being connected to the grid so that they can start delivering energy. Does that fall into any of. Do you have any sort of influence over that kind of thing and how do we resolve that challenge?
- [44:31]
Gus Jasper
Yes. So on my list of day jobs, which are tricky, I'm glad to say.
- [44:36]
Host
Very long list, I'm getting the impression.
- [44:37]
Gus Jasper
Accountability for good is not us, that's for niso. But we work really closely with them. So obviously we are, you know, in regular partnership with them. And we, as I said, we signed a statement of intent with them for how we plan together, both their sort of plans for transmission and then our plans for offshore generation as well. But yeah, but Britain doesn't have a. It doesn't have an electricity commitment problem. It has an electricity delivery problem, you know, so we've got, there's Hundreds of gigawatts in the grid queue at the moment. So there's a lot of things that NISSO are looking at and then some of those need government to back as well. But how do they design the system first up to get most effective deployment of and transmission of energy from generation through to people's homes? But they're also thinking about things like connection reform, which is critical for how the sort of projects that are ready can get quickly onto their grid. What we're doing is making sure that as we go forward, we're getting those issues sorted and baked in up front, as I talked about in the Celtic Sea, that these will come, you know, before anyone's even started any development. We've got the grid in headline terms, we call it holistic network design planned out with niso, so that we've got that part and then we know that there's a route through to transmission of those wind farms.
- [46:01]
Host
God, it is just absolutely fascinating and I've become very quickly aware that I'm asking you all the questions that I'm just deeply nosy about, and I hope they've been interesting to everyone else who's watching and listening. We are coming towards the end and I'm aware that I could also ask you another hour of questions at least, but I know that we should try and wrap it up shortly. So I guess my question is, if I was to grant you a magic wish that you could just say, do you know what? If I could just have xyz, it would make this delivery of our plan so much more straightforward and we could get towards that Clean Power 2030 goal. What would you ask for?
- [46:35]
Gus Jasper
Oh, how long have you got? I think my single thing is that everybody can get behind a whole system plan. You know, that it's not about just each sector or each interest, whether that's nature, whether it's energy, whether it's other community interests, this is an incredible opportunity for the UK or any country that's dealing with a transition, an opportunity for powering yourself through green energy, for creating a new generation of skilled jobs and through restoring and recovering our incredible natural beauty in this country. And so just part of it is just if everybody. Because I spend a lot of my time in meetings always on the problems. And I have to kind of remind, could everyone just take one step back and just see the big picture here? The big picture is we're going to see something quite incredible if we can all get behind that. And that does require us all to then lean in with that whole system view.
- [47:31]
Host
Yeah. God it makes me think that. I think what we need as well as having transforming the world of football manager into Windfarm manager via Minecraft, we also need almost like a Grand Designs way of following wind farm development. Because everyone who ever watches Grand Designs and for those who are not familiar with the program, they take someone's doing a self build and they have to work with the architects and the project managers and they deliver this beautiful home. But for anyone who's watching they can see if you have not done the plan well up front, you will encounter so many issues over the Next sort of 50 minutes of that program. So I think that's what we need to do. I love it.
- [48:09]
Gus Jasper
We've got Minecraft, we've got Grand Designs, it's yeah, definitely the way forward.
- [48:13]
Host
Yeah, we'll get Kevin McLeod on the case. I think.
- [48:15]
Gus Jasper
Very good sway for it.
- [48:17]
Host
Well, I think that is a perfect note to end on, but thank you so much for sharing your insights. I know we will have generated even more questions than provided answers, so I hope that we can have another conversation in the not too distant future. Thank you so much to Gus for joining us for this podcast. I personally found that absolutely fascinating. I had no idea just how complicated this puzzle is. But that is all that we have time for today. Thank you so much to you for listening. Before you go, if I could ask just one teeny tiny favour. If you could give this a comment, a like or a subscribe or all of the above. It is so appreciated and ensures that we can keep on sharing all of the cool and interesting stuff in this clean energy transition. But that's it. If you have been. Thank you for listening.