Localizing Offshore Wind: Insights from KIMAenergy’s Maya Malik

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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 offshore wind industry. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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,