Localizing Offshore Wind: Insights from KIMAenergy’s Maya Malik

Maya Malik, co-founder of KIMAenergy, joins host Rosie Barnes to
discuss local content in offshore wind. Drawing on examples from
the UK, Denmark, Japan, Taiwan and Australia, they explore policies
to encourage domestic manufacturing. Maya shares insights on the
key factors for success, including providing certainty on project
volumes, offering incentives and infrastructure, and exploiting the
potential for low-emission manufacturing in Australia's growing
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Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind
Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have with me
today, Maya Malik, who is the co founder of KIMAenergy. Thanks for
joining us, Maya. Thanks, Rosie. Happy to be here. So today we're
going to be talking all about local content and how countries can
try to get more manufacturing in their region when they're going to
be installing a lot of wind energy. So I know this is an area that
you've worked in a lot. Would you be able to just give us a bit of
background about the kinds of work that you've done in this
industry over the years? Maya Malik: Yeah, sure. So I have a 20
year background in energy and offshore wind. Actually I first
started in, in petrochemicals working in Australia and Europe and
Asia. On the construction projects and 13 years ago, I moved to
offshore wind. So I worked on projects in the UK, in Europe and
Asia. And then together with my business partner, we started up
KIMAenergy, which we are an advisory company focused on offshore
wind in APAC. And I guess our niche is doing offshore wind in new
markets. For most of our careers, we've basically worked on
projects that are, pioneering in nature in the countries that we've
worked in. Now we are based in Melbourne and yeah, continuing to
support other developers with their projects in new markets.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. So you've worked a lot on a lot of different
offshore wind projects all around the globe. I know that from the
conversation that we've had before, before this recording. Can you
tell me about yeah, just a little bit of A few examples of some
interesting offshore wind projects that you've worked on. Maya
Malik: Most interesting and I guess most impactful for me was
working on projects in Taiwan. I'd worked on projects in Europe but
there, the industry developed quite organically over, a period of
two decades projects, getting incrementally bigger and technology
incrementally improving. And Taiwan, I would say was the first
market outside of Northern Europe to implement offshore wind and
also was doing it in a way to accelerate the industrialization. So
go from, doing commercial scale projects over a period of multiple
years to, a handful of years. Yeah I I moved there together with
another colleague from my company, and we were essentially there to
win projects and, do a show in for the first time in in Taiwan. And
yeah, it was a really It was a cool experience. Yeah, just really
not having, the suppliers, not having the experienced people on the
ground and just, it was down to, you and what you knew and, the
resources you could personally call on. To do to do projects. Yeah,
it was a real growth experience, I think for all of us in the
industry at that time. But yeah, super, super great achievement.
Rosemary Barnes: You're Australian, but you started in Australia.
And then Europe, you're in Denmark. Is that right? Maya Malik: I
was based out of the UK working for the main Danish utility. So
yeah, that was my second home. And then, I guess. Denmark did
offshore wind, they were important in the innovation of the
technology, but UK were the ones to really take it to a commercial
scale. So put the policies and targets behind doing offshore wind
at volume, allowing it to industrialize. And then the next market
to do that would be Germany. I was quite involved on those projects
as well. And then we started looking outside of Northern Europe.
Yeah, there was an important period in 2017 when the auction price
for Osherwind showed that, the LCOE was cheaper than gas. And then
it really changed everything. And in our industry and I would say
exploded at that point and then, yeah, and then the first market
that, that would move to implement offshore wind fastest was
Taiwan. And for me, it was, I'd lived in Asia before and I loved it
and it was closer to home. So a great chance to do lots of things
and tick many boxes. Rosemary Barnes: Okay. And now back to
Australia where we're only just getting into gear now. Can you talk
a little bit about Yeah. What's going on with offshore wind at the
moment? I think a lot of our listeners are based in the US so might
not be a hundred percent familiar with what's going on in
Australia, but yeah, it's an exciting time. Can you, yeah, to
summarize where we're up to now? Yeah, sure. Maya Malik: So yeah,
it's a kind of, it's a late market, quite an immature one, but
actually they. did a fantastic job to very fast put in place the
framework to award seabed rights. And I would say, the framework
they put together is amongst the clearest I've seen globally. So it
was very, transparent and easy to understand what you had to do to
secure exclusivity for your offshore area. So Australia is
following a two stage process to award project rights. So first,
there's a competitive price to give away CBAD exclusive rights for
CBAD area. And then there's a second process to give support for
revenue. So this will be similar to U. S. and other countries like
U. K. and Korea. And the process towards CBAD rights is done by the
federal government. So they do it across all states in Australia.
Yeah. And they have essentially looked across the states, where
there's developer interest, where it was viable to do offshore wind
and where there was supporting infrastructure that could be
developed by Carbis. And they basically narrowed it down to six
areas. And they have released what they call a draft declared area
for all sex and some are starting to be finalized. They also have
released invitations to apply for what is called a feasibility
license, which is essentially your exclusive right to develop in an
area. And yeah, the first licenses have just been awarded weeks ago
for an area in the state of Victoria called Gippsland. And I think
the second area will be in New South Wales that will be announced
soon. And then the next step, awarding revenue, is going to be run
by the state government rather than the federal. So there's limited
information on the regime and exactly how it will work, but it's
expecting that it will, be very similar to the UK CFD regime.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so the, they've announced six, six areas
right in Gippsland. And then I saw that there's another six
shortlisted. And I was a bit unsure about what happened there. Did
the government like divide up the area into parcels of, I want to
always want to say land, but I guess parcels of seabed and let
people bid on them. Or was it up to developers to pick what they
thought would be a good spot and then choose exactly which area.
First zone Maya Malik: has awarded licenses. So this is a zone of
Gippsland. And then 12 licenses have been awarded in Gippsland.
Yeah, equivalent to about 25 gigawatts of offshore wind. And of
these 12 licenses, six are confirmed and the other six are in the
process of being confirmed. Yeah, then in terms of how it, how the
framework is designed and how you select and are awarded your
sites. So what the government does is initially announces a
declared area. An issue is an invitation for developers to apply
for a feasibility license. And for Gippsland, the area was 15, 000
kilometers squared and each developer could apply for as many
licenses they want. Each license was allowed to be up to 700
kilometers squared in size, supporting about two and a half
gigawatts of offshore wind. And then, the process to decide. Your
license area was up to individual developers. There was no
coordination and there was also many prerequisites. So in other
markets, you might need to pre qualify by having certain consents
and so on. But here it was essentially you were. To write a
proposal that showed, your technical capability, your financial
capability, and also how you would benefit the economy. And then
based on that application and the area you chose, government took
that and made their assessment over a period of around eight months
and they first decided who would Met the minimum merit criteria. So
they had a criteria, financial ability and if you met merit
criteria and put into the next level, and then they reviewed who
overlapped with who, and then if you're, if you met the merit
criteria, but you overlap with someone else who also met it, then
the government has a kind of discrepancy to decide who has more
merit. And awarded to the person with more merit. So it's a little
bit of luck in this, if you choose an area that no one else chose,
then. Then if you meet the minimum bar, you're probably getting a
license. But if you meet an area that a lot of people chose, then
it's going to go to the person who is deemed, yeah, is the best
developer according to the government score sheet. And then in some
cases they could say you were equal in merit.