Meet the Team: Kate Johannesen, Head of Scotland – Scotland
At OWC, our teams are constantly expanding, into more locations, in expertise and in sectors of influence, so that our people can truly drive safety and sustainability across our energy and oceans.
Every month we introduce you to a member of our team, so that you can meet the energy behind change. This week, we invite you to meet our Head of Scotland, Kate Johannesen.
Position: Head of Scotland – Scotland
Office: Glasgow
Hobbies: Hiking, snowboarding, squash, piano
Favourite movie / book: Lord of the Rings
What does your day-to-day look like at OWC?
A typical day would always include some project work, where I am focused on ensuring quality of delivery, from interpreting client requirements, providing direction to my team and ultimately reviewing the outputs. Currently, I am involved with two bid advisory projects for upcoming seabed leasing rounds, development of a business plan, and preparation of a project design envelope to support consenting of a major floating offshore wind project. The other part of my day centres around country management activities, such as engaging with potential clients to agree on new scopes of work, monitoring performance across our suite of Scottish projects and supporting our talented junior engineers with their career development.
What inspired you to join your industry?
As a civil engineer, I love working on engineering problems where nature is involved. I would say building in the oceans really tops that list in terms of the challenges to overcome, not only in terms of how to model ocean processes and factor these into the design, but also how to install and maintain structures in such an extreme environment! Knowing that the projects I work on are intended to help address climate change is a bonus additional motivation.
Can you tell us about something exciting you are working on right now?
I am currently supporting one of our clients with their flagship Scottish floating wind project. This project is quite unique in terms of its fast development timeline, and it is exciting to be advising on what will potentially be one of the first floating projects at commercial scale.
What does the future look like in energy and oceans?
We are seeing great progress in offshore wind but I think it’s important to recognise this is only part of the solution to achieve a better balance between energy demand and emissions. For energy and oceans, I would like to see the tidal and wave energy sectors growing, with improving the efficiency of our use of the seabed and offshore transmission systems in mind. It has been good to see more focus on ocean health recently in the public domain, and, as an engineer, I hope we can continue to improve our integration of environmental, commercial and societal considerations for future energy projects built offshore.
OWC’s experience in Scotland demonstrates how floating offshore wind is moving from concept to reality. Most recently, we have been supporting cable engineering for Green Volt, a 560 MW project set to be Europe’s first commercial-scale floating wind farm, and acting as owner’s engineer across Ayre and Bowdun, two projects that will add 2 GW of capacity!
