Victoria Ridyard

Transcript

Day-to-day my job is very varied - so no two days are ever the same. The main purpose of my role is to obtain all the necessary consent required for the offshore wind farm that I'm working on. That includes planning permissions, marine licenses and consents under the electricity act.

I work with a team of other consent managers, who are working to do environmental impact assessment and I work with our Engineers - what we're trying to do is to develop a project that is going to deliver what we need to for 2030 but that minimizes the environmental impacts. Where impacts can't be avoided, we ensure that there's appropriate mitigation in place so that we have a win-win for the environment and for the production of electricity.

Appropriate mitigation would be where an impact is unavoidable on a project... For example, you may have to use a hammer to hammer piles into the the ground in the sea. Mitigation might be to look at the number of hammers you use at once, or to look at the number of hammer strikes you would use in a day. That would ensure that whatever impacts there are on marine mammals in that area are minimized, so that they're not harmful at a project level.

Much of the day-to-day work in terms of influencing is to do with how we work with our engineering teams and how we refine our project designs. So whilst the engineering team will be looking to maximize energy efficiency and energy output from the wind farm, our role is to ensure that whatever design is put forward is compatible with the receiving environment of the project.

At a strategic level, there are opportunities to influence policy and approaches to environmental assessment through the work that we do. For example, one of the projects that I worked on in the North Sea Aberdeen offshore wind farm has recently published a report after some ongoing monitoring, where they have demonstrated that there have been no bird collissions to do with the the rotors and the turbines. That's a massive piece of research that will then be fed back to look at how we do impact assessment. It will reduce uncertainty and it will help us ensure that we are delivering the best projects. We also have engagement with industry organizations such as Scottish Renewables and RenewableUK... we engage with them on an ongoing basis to comment on draft policy, and ensure that we are representing the industry and that government understands the challenges that the industry is facing so that it can develop an appropriate policy response.

I think there's a perception that consenting is a a short-term role - and you tick a box, you get your permission and off you go - that's not the case! Once a consent has been awarded there's a lot of work that then goes into complying with that consent - so supporting the development of the project that will be implemented, ensuring that management plans are developed and complied with throughout the construction process. Then once a project's up and running, there's ongoing monitoring with that - so there may be a need to obtain additional marine licenses for ongoing work, or in the event that a project is decommissioned or hopefully repowered, then there'll be a whole new round of consenting required. So it's a long-term role within the industry.

I think consenting comes first in many aspects of development, and it's undoubtedly one of the most important aspects to delivering your project. So invariably, the consenting team will come across challenges first in a project, and then feed that back through the the project management team and work to solve those problems. Those problems can be some of the barriers that we face - resources for example. Where we're identifying that there are inadequate resources either in our, organizations or in regulators.... we can seek to influence to ensure that there are more people made available to see those things through. It can also be challenges to do with either environmental constraints or technical constraints that we find out as we're doing environmental impact assessment, and then we're working closely with our team to figure out how to solve those problems.

I love my job, because I think it's important. I think addressing security of energy supply is important - so every day that's what I'm thinking when I get up and go to work. I love the fact that it's a collaborative industry, that we work closely with regulators, with statutory nature conservation bodies. And we're all looking for the same outcomes. We all want to protect the environment as best we can by delivering what we need for society.