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Allen and Joel sit down with Jonathan Cole, CEO of Corio Generation and Chairman of the Global Wind Energy Council, for an illuminating discussion on the future of offshore wind energy. Cole shares invaluable insights on navigating regulatory challenges across multiple markets, building sustainable supply chains, and securing project financing. He also emphasizes the critical role of community engagement through what he calls “social license” in developing successful offshore wind projects.
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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we’re honored to have with us Jonathan Cole, a visionary leader in the global offshore wind industry. and a key figure driving the transition to sustainable energy. Jonathan is the CEO of Corio Generation, a global offshore wind powerhouse, launched in April of 2022.
As a portfolio manager of Macquarie Asset Management operating independently, Corio has quickly established itself as a major player in the renewable energy sector. Under Jonathan’s leadership, Corio has amassed one of the world’s largest offshore wind development portfolios, boasting over 30 gigawatts of projects in various stages of development across Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas.
Jonathan’s influence extends far beyond his role at Corio. He currently serves as the chairman of the Global Wind Energy Council, GWEC. and his industry expertise has been recognized through numerous leadership positions. These include chairing the Global Offshore Wind Health and Safety Organization, the UK’s Offshore Wind Program Board, and the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapults Industry Advisory Group.
He has also been a board member of Renewable UK and a member of the UK’s Offshore Wind Industry Council. Before joining Corio, Jonathan played a pivotal role in shaping the offshore wind landscape at eBird DLA from 2010 to 2021, he spearheaded the creation and growth of Ebert Della’s offshore wind business, transforming it into a market leader with approximately 14 billion Euros invested a project pipeline exceeding 30 gigawatts, and a team of 800 professionals spanning four continents and 11 countries.
Jonathan’s a very busy person and we appreciate his time. Jonathan, welcome to the program. Great to be here with you. You’ve been a busy person. I’ve been watching your LinkedIn account in all the countries and continents you’ve been on over the last couple of months. You’re busy in offshore wind and you were just in New York for the climate week.
What was some of the outcome from those sessions that you attended?
Jonathan Cole: Yeah, it’s a busy time for offshore wind and busy time for me, particularly. And I was in New York last week really with two hats on. One was with my Corio CEO hat on because we’ve got a big project out there in New York Attentive Energy.
So I was spending some time with the team out there and hearing all the great work they’re doing. But also I’m the chair of the Global Wind Energy Council, so I was out there with that hat on, helping on the advocacy piece more generally. So it was a really interesting week. I think New York Climate Week is a really important date in the calendar, the climate calendar, because it serves as a bit of a precursor for the COP events later in the year and quite often is quite important in setting the agenda for that.
So we were out there with the G Wake and the Global Renewables Alliance talking about some of the big topics. That need to be tackled if we’re going to convert into reality the tripling up of renewables that was a part of the last COP 28 treaty, talking about some of the things that need to be done to make that happen.
So that was a really interesting and positive week, I have to say.
Joel Saxum: Jonathan, if I was to ask what are the top two, maybe, just to keep it simple, the top two things that as the GWF chairman, of course, and at Climate Week, what are the top two challenges that are facing offshore wind at a global scale right now?
Jonathan Cole: If you don’t mind, Joel, I’m going to give you a top three, right? Yeah, perfect. There’s three big things that are necessary to happen in order to get the tripling up of renewables on track. So one is on the regulatory side, and that is about putting in place some regulatory enablers. Principally around speeding up the permitting process.
So all these great projects that, that, developers like Corio and others want to build can get through that process as quickly as possible, but also on the regulatory side, speeding up the build out of the transmission system, the grid system, so that when the projects are ready. The system is ready to take the power.
So that’s the first part of it. The second part of it is around supply chain and trade. And I think we all recognize that there is a huge challenge in tripling up because there’s a huge amount of capacity needing to be built in the supply chain, but also that’s a huge opportunity. One of the most exciting opportunities, actually, that we face is the ability to breathe life and economic activity back into these coastal communities and post industrial towns where offshore wind farms are located, but that doesn’t happen by accident.
It needs coordinated action. It needs industrial planning, and it needs a sensible approach to things like trade policy. And the third thing is finance. This Now, finance in the more mature markets and the OECD markets is probably less of an issue, although the cost of capital going up has really had an impact and we need to do what we can to de risk and try to take that cost of capital back down.
But when you think of finance in the non OECD countries and the emerging, markets, developing economies, Finance is one of the single biggest barriers to the energy transition, because access to capital at reasonable terms and reasonable rates is hugely significant. Those developing markets could be paying 4, 5, 6 percent more for capital than in the developed markets, and that makes the energy transition so much more expensive for them.
So the three big things, getting the regulations right, and I think there’s a political will to do that. We know who to do that. Getting the supply chain built up. There’s definitely a political will to create the jobs, but we just need to get the right mechanisms in place to do it. And the finance, getting the finance in place, and in particular thinking about de risking for the mature markets.
and getting concessional finance and, other finance in place for the emerging markets.
Allen Hall: Can I touch upon the regulatory aspect for a minute? Because I think you have such a difficult problem ahead of you. You have projects in the US, UK, South Korea, Ireland, Australia, Taiwan, Brazil. Each one of those has a regulatory framework that is different from the others.
In the United States, I think the issue has been more recently, not the federal government, they seem very attuned to developing offshore projects. It seems to be getting it into the states and then into the localities and transmission being one of those issues. How are you starting to navigate some of those state and local issues, particularly in the U.
S.? where they seem to arise haphazardly at times.
Jonathan Cole: Yeah I think that development of these types of infrastructure projects is very much a local game. You have to really understand the local regulatory framework and the stakeholder landscape to go about it in the right way. And you have to recognize that these are quite long development cycles.
They’re complicated projects. It takes a long time to assess the potential and engage the potentially affected or interested parties so that you can find solutions. So you need to be in it for the long term, and you need to understand the landscape that you’re playing into. And then at that point, it’s really just about being very present and very engaging and very transparent and very open.
So the US market is a complex market because You’ve got permitting at multiple layers. So you’ve got the federal permits, the BOEM are managing as a one stop shop, which is great for the federal point of view, but then you’ve got state and even, local and municipal permits that you need to get placed.
So there’s a lot of intervention there and a lot of need to be constantly sharing and talking and engaging in a positive way, listening to people. adjusting your plans, where you can to try and accommodate those people. Educating a lot of cases about, the positive impacts and trying to dispel maybe some of the myths that you hear.
And just generally trying to show people that what we’re doing is a force for good. We’re here to do something good. From a planetary perspective in terms of climate change, but even a local perspective in terms of energy security and local tax areas and job creation and all that stuff. So I think it’s about knowing the landscape and being there every day, working hard, being very transparent and open with people.
Allen Hall: I have to applaud Corio because I’ve been following all the work that’s happening in New Jersey and how active Corio is in the community to try to bring local suppliers to connect with the schools, to connect with the neighborhoods. There’s a lot of a ground game that’s going on right now. And you seem willing to put people there and to staff those efforts well ahead of putting foundations in the water.
That is, I think, a slightly unique approach that we’ve seen some operators Put engineering offices in and obviously they need to go do that But I think you’re right in the United States getting past that regulatory hurdle happens by the states and localities getting used to you being there and Contributing
Joel Saxum: to the local economy.
It’s very that’s a very specific thing in the United States for sure Allen we were just talking last night about the difference between what’s happening in the And some of the East Coast towns, as opposed to Wind, as opposed to the Midwest so people lump the United States into one, but it’s really different locally, even from, New England down to Virginia, it’s completely different.
Culture and people and ideas, but with choreo and your broader experience with GWEC, really, Jonathan is you’re, because you guys are in, and you’re playing in all kinds of different markets, each one of those has its own like hyper local kind of culture that you need to engage with, to get your messages across properly and everybody needs that differently.
How do you guys tackle that? Is it local people in every area or how does that work? Yeah.
Jonathan Cole: Yeah, that’s it. I think you have to get the right balance. The way I often phrase this is in offshore wind, in order to be competitive in the market, you need to have a global outlook. But in order to be in the market in the first place, you need to be local and you need to be responsive locally to what’s going on there.
And one thing I think we’ve managed to do quite well in Corio, and I guess it’s because we’re a, a relatively agile player, we’re relatively young. A, the type of company we are means that we’re able to get local quite quickly. So if you look in each of the countries where we’re operating, we have very strong local teams in each of those markets who are very well plugged in to the, the policymaking and the regulatory and the stakeholder landscape, so in Korea, in Taiwan, where we were one of the early movers, the market makers.
So we’re there able, I think, to do that, and I think it’s really important. The phrase that we use, and a lot of people in our industry use, is social license. If you’re building infrastructure projects that’s going to be in communities for generations, you need to get the social license to be there.
You need to show them that you’re doing this with them and for them, not to them and in spite of them. And I think that’s a really important mantra for us is, working with communities to sell the benefits. Um, and be seen as a long term part of the community. That’s what infrastructure, good infrastructure is all about, is it enables economic activity and other activity to flourish if you do it properly.
Joel Saxum: I’ve been in the global oil and gas industry, onshore, offshore, global wind, onshore and offshore, large capital projects. I have never heard that term, social license, and I love it. I think it’s a, I think it’s a great way to go about things.
Allen Hall: Let’s back up a little bit, and I want to talk about supply chain because that seems to be a huge driver.
In offshore wind at the moment, and Jonathan, I’ve watched some YouTube videos, you’re talking about supply chain, what makes sense in terms of supply chain? Is everything local? Is it a worldwide effort? And how do you manage the cost if it if you try to force everything local? Those are some unique insights.
You want to explain sort of your thoughts on that? What’s a supply chain should look like when you’re developing large offshore projects?
Jonathan Cole: Sure. So I think that the first thing really to see, and this is not me trying to then give a known answer, but There is no single answer to that question. There is no right answer because it very much depends on market by market, area by area, but I think what is important is that when you are developing your supply chain or industrial policy around something like offshore wind, that you align that with your energy policy and you do it in a very rational way.
I think there’s three layers to this. There’s localization. There’s regionalization and there’s globalization right now. Localization is basically where you try to bring things that make sense to be done locally, into the local area, and you create economic activity and jobs. Now, there are certain things that can always be done locally, like a lot of the o and m and the services that rely on proximity to the asset, and those are good long term well paid jobs, by the way.
Quite often unionized, paid jobs as well. But, depending on your economy, depending on, your labor force, it may be that there’s other things that make a lot of sense to do locally, some of the fabrication and manufacturing, or it may be that actually those things don’t fit very well in your local economy.
And there are a lot of big western economies that are quite high wage economies where it doesn’t really make sense to try and do, heavily manualized industrial processes In their economies, because you’re not going to do it as efficiently as it can be done elsewhere. So I think what you need to do is drive, strive for a localization policy that actually makes sense for your own economy.
Then when you talk about regionalization, I think there what you’re actually looking at is if you’re in a market where the scale of your own market isn’t big enough to stimulate the level of supply chain investment that’s needed, What you need to start doing is looking outside of your own local market at a more regional solution, aggregating that demand, and then creating a supply chain solution on a regional basis.
Now, if you’re talking about the northeast of the U. S., probably the scale is up there. Overall to create a pretty healthy supply chain offering. But if you go individual state by state, not every state in its own right has that scale. And so aggregating and looking at it on a regional basis makes sense.
If you go into maybe Southeast Asia, it becomes even more of an issue. Because for those types of countries to get, to attract the investment they need, they’re going to have to do it probably on a more regional basis. And then you’ve got globalization, which is basically those aspects of the supply chain where in order to create resilience, in order to create, you know, efficiencies and economies of scale, You want to be able to source them globally and they’re, relatively mobile components, all the rest of it.
And those things you should leave on that basis. And that’s how you create a more resilient, healthy supply chain. So I think that’s the way that I look at it, the way that Corio looks at it. It’s also, I think, very well aligned with how GWEC looks at, these things, localization, regionalization, globalization.
Understand the pros and cons of each, understand what works best for your market, your area, your region, and then design an industrial policy that plays to that and is well aligned with your energy policy, and try not to have the two disconnected. Does that make sense? It makes sense to me. I talk about this a lot.
Allen Hall: Makes total sense. So just bringing that down a notch, you have to deal with large manufacturers of equipment and the timing of some of your projects is a couple years out. So you have a little bit of flexibility working with OEMs from cables to substations to the wind turbines themselves. How are you approaching this over the next couple of years?
Looking at sort of global forecasts for inflation and pricing and the OEMs and trying to get a slot into. Manufacturing a turbine, even. There’s a lot of moving pieces, getting a ship located and scheduled in. How are you trying to manage that in this sort of uneven economic times?
Jonathan Cole: I think the best way to do it is to do it in a very transparent way, along with those key suppliers.
Sharing openly your own plans, what you’re likely to need, when and where you’re likely to need it. And, having them share back their own capacities and capability to supply, and, that’s a good starting place, because then you’ve got a decent, they’ve got a decent view of how the market looks for them, and if there’s capacity investments needed, then, they get the visibility they need to make that investment case.
Equally, we get a view of where, our, how our project planning fits in. And whether we need to adjust that project planning or, the timing for when we need to start making big decisions and securing slots in the supply chain. So I think it has to be done in a very iterative, but quite open, transparent basis.
And then we have quite a good team internally who are, a procurement team, who are very engaging in the market and quite well known in the market with these key suppliers, as well as, good engineering teams and other teams who are good at, I think, predicting What we need, how the market’s looking in terms of its ability to supply the things that may influence that price and trying to, make good sensible assumptions about that so that we keep developing our projects with business cases that are, fairly robust and resilient and, less prone to shock.
Joel Saxum: I think that, what I’m hearing here is the same thing that we hear from a lot of angles within the wind sector, and it’s just transparency and collaboration, right? Not everybody should have to commission a 50, 000 study from some consulting firm to find out who’s building a wind farm, right? It would be nice if everybody was open about, these are our plans, this is our future.
But what you’re saying to me here is, when we talk local, regional, global and the goals of all of these countries, right? When we talk about COP get togethers, and how all of these countries are coming forward and saying, we’re gonna do this by 2030. We’re gonna do this by 2050. And these great things for the energy transition, what I hear is global opportunity for this supply chain, right?
So whether it is building components, supporting the people that build the components, because these things trickle all the way down, right? And when you get to the port fac, even into building out port facilities and there there’s jobs made from the global wind industry all the way from, you think about the people building the turbines down to the people.
Build it, having the restaurants that are next to the port, right? There’s so much opportunity here that the wind sector is bringing to the world, especially Jonathan, like you had said, some of these, these maybe depressed economies or other places that at once were, Allen and I were in Louisiana the other day, and we were at this port facility that used to employ 26, 000 people.
Now there’s a hundred there. But there’s wind coming in and they’re bringing more jobs and expanding these areas that were once thriving back to their, their past legacy, which is great, right? The wind industry has the capability to do that. So with the supply chain, I see that big opportunity coming.
However, as we’ve been through permitting and regulatory, we talked a little bit about the supply chain. The really big thing here the elephant in the room for a lot of people is finance. We’ve talked about, we talk about it on the podcast quite often about, what inflation has done and higher interest rates and paused projects and the cost of capital.
What do you see as the environment right now and then looking into the future for the ability to finance these large projects?
Jonathan Cole: Overall, the liquidity And the desire to provide finance into the projects is probably where it needs to be. But I think that what we’re not helping ourselves, I think, by imposing a bit too much risk and unpredictability and delay in the processes, but, so take, for example, we talk about permitting, right?
And we say permitting needs to be shortened. Why does that matter? The permitting phase of a project is the phase where the financing costs the most. ’cause it’s the most at risk, right? And what you and it tends to therefore be funded by equity, not by debt. And they are so therefore, the capacity of the development community to keep going and going the industry.
is enhanced significantly if you can shorten those development processes and allow that equity to be released again into other projects and get the projects into the next phase where it’s mostly funded by date. We tend a lot to impose on projects all these additional things that need to be done that put, additional risks into the projects where the more you can simplify a project and its revenue stream, the lower.
The cost of capital becomes, and so you can take a lot of risk. So there’s a lot of things that we can do, I think, just by simplifying the regulatory framework to, to improve the terms of financing and to move us through the cycles quicker and therefore create a lot more liquidity. So that’s how I see it.
Allen Hall: Let me drop the OEM back into the discussion here in terms of stability. The GE’s and Vestas of the world decided that megawatts is off the table. They’re going to stop at 15 megawatts. That put a lot of uncertainty into your planning. And in the United States, it made some of the states a little nervous because it changes some of the plans and whatnot.
What effect does that have on you on planning when the OEMs say, Hey, 15 megawatts is where we’re staying. Or do you go down the pathway of someone like Siemens and that’s it? Call him out, specifically who’s attempting a 20 megawatt generator? How does that play out and how frustrating is that when you’re trying to develop a project and you can’t even define the basic turbine premise.
Jonathan Cole: Yeah I think when you’re building infrastructure what’s more important is the timing and sequence of these events than the actual events themselves. A decision to stick at 15 or go to 18 in its own right is not a bad decision as long as it’s made at the right time in the cycle of the project and it’s planned in.
And when you are planning the size of the project and the shape of the project and designing all the other plant and equipment around the project, and you’re setting the tariff for the project, if those things are all taken into consideration, then that’s perfectly fine. We, we can work with that.
It’s where things change. an inopportune moment that it starts to become more problematic. There’s a perfectly good argument that says that sticking at the same level of turbine size for longer is a healthy thing because it’s good for the balance sheet of OEMs. It allows them to recover some of those investment costs, but also gives you more time to drive, industrialization and, economies of scale and learning curve benefits into the process.
And as an industry, we’ve always been really proud of how rapidly we’ve upscaled the technology and rapidly we brought down the cost. But, probably it wasn’t the most industrially efficient thing to do because we were all the time then having to retool and rebuild the infrastructure and the ports and the vessels and all the rest of it.
I don’t think turbine size in its own right is a good or bad. I think it’s, it just depends again on the timing of it and, how you then react to that and plan with that.
Joel Saxum: I think what that, what we’re like, what you’re getting at is the same thing that we’re, we talk about quite often as well as if we can like, Stopping at 15 megawatts is not bad.
It allows us, it allows the supply chain to stabilize is what it really does, right? So when people, the general public doesn’t, hasn’t seen a lot of the operations, but simple things like how you even put a blade onto a ship. All of those mounts and chairs and brackets retooled every time that you change the size of a blade or anything of this sort.
So staying at a certain level to be honest with you, it might make it easier and make the supply chain more, like I say, more stable, but some give some longevity and the ability for people, like you said to balance out their balance sheets for lack of a better term over the long time for their, of the R and D that they had to put into these things to, to make it happen.
Jonathan Cole: And it is absolutely essential that we do that, because for the energy transition to work, you need a sustainable supply chain. And the economics have to make sense. I think someone said, you can’t get green outcomes with red numbers. I heard that. I think it’s totally true. At the day, this is a 10 trillion investment program to to achieve the energy transition.
And that has to be done in a profitable, sustainable way. Not excessively but it has to be profitable enough to make people want to stay in. So I totally agree with that. I think, having been in this industry for a long time, you. I would say that we are a little bit the product of our regulatory environment, and that for a long time in offshore wind, we were basically told, you’re ticking so many of the boxes that we need tech for, but you’re too expensive.
You’ve got to get the price down. And our whole mantra, was driving the price down and a big part of that was driving the technology up as well as driving cost of capital down. And so we, we chase through a lot of technology cycles, maybe a bit too quickly as we try to do that. I think nowadays we need a more mature long term outlook, which is to see that this energy transition is not about discovering the cheapest price of electricity.
It’s about abating climate change. It’s about creating, clean air and water. It’s about Investment in infrastructure, it’s about energy security, it’s about energy price stability, it’s about job creation and skills and community benefits. All of that has a value. I, and that value deserves to be somehow priced in.
So I think, if we get to a point where from a regulatory expectation perspective, we can stick at a price that we’re happy with and we don’t need to keep constantly chasing price reductions, then I think we can then get to a point where we can industrialize and standardize the supply chain more and get much better.
Overall outcomes for everyone, but that’s a mindset shift that we’re moving closer to in a lot of markets, but we’re not there yet because a lot of people still think that this has to be cheaper than the alternative as well as better for all those other reasons I mentioned.
Allen Hall: That’s a good segue to the long term prospects here for offshore wind.
You’re deeply involved in it worldwide. What do you see?
Jonathan Cole: I really believe that the long term prospects for offshore wind are extremely positive. I absolutely believe that the energy transition has to take place. It’s essential that we get to a net zero world for the health of our planet, completely and utterly there.
And I really believe that the only way we can do that in the time frame we need is to go down the road of an aggressive policy of electrification and decarbonisation. So we electrify as much of the economy as we possibly can. And then we produce that electricity by the wayside. Low carbon sources. And when you look at it that way, you then say what are the technologies available to you to deliver in the time frame?
And they are the renewable technologies. And so solar, onshore wind, offshore wind, geothermal, they all have a big role to play in the energy mix of the future. And offshore wind is offering a complementarity to those other renewables technologies. Because it doesn’t have the day by day or seasonal variability.
It gives you big scale. In the case of the North East of the U. S. it’s giving you massive scale really close to the demand centers. Without causing problems on the onshore transmission network. So the fundamentals are so obvious that, I think the future is, has got to be bright. I do think we’re going through a difficult phase right now because of inflation and cost of capital increases and supply chain fragility.
But if we can hold on there and we can get the support we need from regulators and policy makers, we get through this and then offshore wind is going to be a huge part. of the energy mix. More or less every country with a coastline is going to be using that coastline to produce clean, abundant, affordable, reliable electricity in the future.
I’ve got no doubt about that.
Joel Saxum: In the last four years or so, we’ve had globally a kind of a tumultuous economic times, right? Where it was, we watched every, no matter what market you’re watching, it’s, it was up and down and up and down for, Quite a while there, but what we need through, and this is an opinion, but what we need through times like that.
And what we see going forward for offshore wind is we need a steady hand on the tiller. We need that good leadership to point all of us in the right direction to, to gather these supply chain companies, to make sure that we’re dealing with the proper regulatory agencies to get the permitting in place and those kinds of things.
From us, Jonathan, appreciate what you’re doing at Corio and greater in the board positions you have. And what GWEC is doing at the same time. Jonathan,
Allen Hall: I want to thank you for your time today. I know you’re a busy person. I know you’re going to be all over the world. And your frequent flower miles must be astounding.
And I want to thank you for your time. And if someone wants to learn about Choreo Generation, how would they do that?
Jonathan Cole: If they want to hear more, they can find us on social channels, like LinkedIn, and they can get access to all the company details from there. They’ll also be able to keep up with my travel schedule as you mentioned, but they’ll see a lot of good information about all the things we’re doing and the countries we’re doing it and the stuff we’re doing, not just in the projects and shows.
But the people that we’re trying to bring along with us on this really important journey.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Everybody should check out coriogeneration.com for all the great things that Corio is up to and to find out where their projects are. Jonathan, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We appreciate you having you on the show.
I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much to both of you.
