Marine Consulting Firm LOC Looks Towards Offshore Wind Innovation
Since its establishment in Fenchurch Street, London, in 1979, LOC Group has focused on delivering independent specialised marine engineering consultancy to the maritime and offshore energy industry. Since 2002 LOC has been closely involved in many of the offshore renewable energy sector’s most advanced engineering developments and continues to push for innovation in offshore wind – whether fixed or floating.
By R.V. Ahilan, LOC Group, UK
The Four Founders
In the late 1970s, LOC’s four founders – two master mariners and two civil engineers – identified a need for a specialised marine and engineering consultancy. Having put their heads together, they established LOC in 1979 with the aim of providing independent, high quality consultancy and surveying services to the world’s shipping and offshore energy industries. The company opened its first offices on Fenchurch Street in London. Since then, LOC has grown into a global organisation with offices strategically located in the major energy and shipping hubs throughout Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. LOC continues to grow and expand to meet the demands of the oil and gas, shipping and renewables industries around the globe.
Developing Expertise
The LOC team comprises more than 350 qualified personnel in a broad range of disciplines, including naval architects, master mariners and a host of engineers – marine, civil, offshore, structural and subsea & pipeline. Since undertaking its first renewable energy project in 2002, LOC Group has developed its expertise in this area to the point where it is the most experienced marine warranty survey consultants in the offshore renewable energy industry. To date we have provided services on more than two-thirds of Europe’s offshore wind farms.
LOC’s renewable energy activities build on the group’s experience serving as an independent and impartial marine consultancy to deliver operational success for offshore wind projects. LOC has pulled together a team of renewables experts from companies within the group to achieve a greater focus for work and expertise in offshore renewable energy. This allows the team of engineers to boost their offshore renewables skills and deliver innovative consultancy to clients. It also provides a structure for the business to expand in-house knowledge and acquire and adopt additional areas of complementary expertise in the industry.
An Impartial Guarantor
As a majority management-owned business, LOC Group is able to operate as an impartial guarantor of engineering, construction and operational excellence for all its clients. Having established a global network of offices through our maritime and offshore oil and gas services, both the group and our renewables team can provide cutting-edge marine technical expertise to offshore wind developers in locations across the globe, including in many of the leading offshore wind markets in Asia. To date – and in partnership with our sister company, the marine engineering and design consultancy Longitude – we have already provided warranty consultancy and engineering services for more than 60 offshore wind projects, in 14 countries across Europe, America and Asia, with a total capacity of more than 9GW.
Delivering Consulting Service
Across these projects LOC’s core services have included marine warranty surveying, technical advisory and due diligence and project management, as well as transportation and installation, and marine casualty services. Our project experience covers all major turbine manufacturers and foundation types, including monopiles, jackets and gravity based foundations as well as innovative floating turbines. LOC also has experience overseeing and warranting the installation of more than 4,000 kilometres of array and export cabling for offshore wind farms, and the construction of more than 25 HVAC substations, ranging from 132kV to 320kV output. As the offshore wind industry innovates to demonstrate the potential of floating wind, LOC has again been at the forefront of helping developers and their contractors to execute these projects safely. LOC provided marine representation on the world’s first full-scale floating wind venture at Hywind, and marine warranty services on WindFloat, the first semisubmersible-based floating wind project. LOC currently advises clients across the life cycle of offshore wind development and production, from first blueprints all the way through to project operation.
Areas of Growth for LOC
While the financial crash of 2008 has starved many industries of growth, offshore wind has been bucking this trend for several years, and the past year has been no exception. Record investment levels have taken European wind energy far beyond where it was just two years ago. With an eye on this resilience, LOC Group is aiming to grow by 20% each year in the medium term. We are expanding our focus on offshore wind activities and drawing on many pre-existing strengths and a presence in the offshore energy space to extend our service offering to include environmental resource assessment, turbine technology and operations and maintenance management. At LOC, an end-to-end service is considered essential to delivering successful projects, and to developing strong working relationships with clients. LOC consultants offer a service that goes beyond the drawing board, and engineers are on site to work alongside their clients every day.
Expanding LOC’s Expertise
A key part of delivering this end-to-end service to our clients will be a focus on widening LOC’s presence in the renewable energy value chain; indeed, it is anticipated that the amount of work carried out by the consultancy in this sector by 2020 will increase threefold, partly through organic growth and partly through acquisitive growth. In tandem with this, LOC is committed to innovating across the industry value chain; this means investing in technology as well as environmental resource management, operations and maintenance skills to strengthen the services the business offers. This commitment to innovation has seen LOC develop publications with Renewables UK and the Crown Estate, helping to further industry knowledge and standards. Looking ahead, we expect acquisitions in the offshore wind space to help extend the business into related areas of expertise that will support and enhance our existing global network.
Emerging Technologies
One example of where LOC expects emerging technology and developing expertise to push industry growth and help LOC to expand as a business is in floating wind technology, an area of the industry that is maturing rapidly across the world. While Japan and Europe are expected to lead the way in terms of this technology’s commercialisation, other markets will not be far behind. Having been the first market to deploy two full-scale systems, Europe has recently been overtaken by Japan, which now has three floating wind demonstration projects. One of these, the Fukushima Shimpuu, boasts the largest floating turbine installed to date – the 7MW Sea Angel. The success of floating wind in the long run seems guaranteed, though the industry still needs to resolve some niggling scaling issues in terms of substructure, moorings, electrical systems and substations, to ensure that floating wind farms can be safely and efficiently built. Such is the eager competition to develop successful platforms that, combined with existing offshore engineering expertise, LOC expects this technology to achieve commercial scale early in the next decade. Pre-commercial floating wind farms can be seen on the horizon, and are likely to be commissioned in Europe within the next year. As with fixed foundations, once the commercial concept is proven, scaling up could be rapid, offering enormous potential for growth.
The Future of the Industry
Turning to the future of offshore wind more widely, it seems likely that the explosive growth seen recently will continue. Only last year, the offshore wind strategy published by the US Department of Energy and the US Department of the Interior projected that, in the USA alone, installed capacity could reach 86GW by mid-century. In the near term, offshore wind auctions in Europe that are expected to be inviting tenders in 2017 have promoted capacity of more than 3GW, and are being offered down the European coastline from the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic. Based on the outcome of a record year for tenders in 2016, the medium-term construction pipeline for developers promises more than 3GW of capacity, much of it to be built and operated at record low-strike prices. It’s these low prices that hold interest for LOC, as they will make many demands on engineering skill, technology and innovation, and become a proving ground for some of the most ambitious consultancies in the industry. Some of the demands created by these low prices are already being met, but equally there are challenges that will need to be faced in the future. The growth LOC anticipates in the medium term is aggressive and pacy, and, the business remains committed to driving forwards the development of the offshore wind industry, particularly in the UK. Looking ahead, LOC expects the UK’s North Sea wind farms to continue to be essential to the creation of an environment in which innovation thrives across the value chain, from technology to finance, and construction to O&M.
Biography
Dr R.V. Ahilan is Group Director, Renewables Advisory & Energy Technology at LOC Group. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of both IMarEST and RINA. He holds a BSc (Leeds) and MS (Caltech) in Civil Engineering, a PhD (Cantab) in Engineering Fluid Mechanics and an MBA (Imperial). He is a well-known technology and business manager with over three decades of industry experience, more than 15 years of which has been at board level. Prior to LOC, Ahilan was EVP of the Renewables Advisory Division of DNV GL.
