LETS TALK TRANSITION
Interview with Dan McGrail,CEO, Renewables UK.
Interview by Moray Melhuish – Founder of Annet Consulting, an Offshore Wind and Subsea Specialist

How do you define a just transition?
“It's a good question and I think to start off, we're an industry very much at the heart of net zero, so social justice and climate justice are very closely linked.

I think we can see the impact of the cost of living at the moment and therefore helping to reduce the cost of renewable energy, which has been very much been a part of the story so far, is key and helping the sector to becoming the cheapest part of the electricity generation system is a huge part of that solution, because it means that the energy transition will work for everybody in the end.

That means this can’t be a transition which falls unnecessarily on those who can't afford it. Reducing the cost of renewables over the last decade has been a really important part of it and we need to think about the ‘Just transition’ on three different levels:

One is ‘People’ one is ‘Places’, and one is ‘Planet’, right? So, starting with ’People’, it really is about, jobs and creating employment opportunities. The industry grew from initially being subsidized to now being practically unsubsidized and in many cases there is a facility to pay back to the consumer. Creating jobs out of this for people across the country is an important part of the solution and as an industry we have to set ourselves targets for apprenticeships, for diversity and inclusion and helping workers transition from other sectors.

Clearly the energy transition will impact on many incumbent industries and therefore we want to make sure we create pathways for people to come out of those industries and into the wind industry, whether that's onshore, offshore, or whether that's in technical roles or in project management or engineering, or in many of the supply side aspects of this industry.

Then when we think about ‘Places’, our industry has a really unique proposition in terms of helping rejuvenate local economies, in particular in coastal communities, which have been perhaps declining and need rejuvenation.

Look at some of the great impacts we've had in places like Grimsby, which is now the biggest operations and maintenance hub in Europe for offshore wind. If we look at Hull, where Siemens employ a thousand people and are growing their factory there, where they manufacture blades and we are seeing the impact of that on a community, which has suffered from industrial decline, its really important...

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