How ‘energy islands’ can supercharge offshore wind

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Technology, Business, Science

4.7 • 219 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you've paid much attention to the wind industry lately, the news isn’t great. Building new projects is getting more expensive and getting government permission to do it is taking longer than ever. Even major players like Orsted, Vestas and Siemens are struggling.

But it's not all negative — there are still big players winning in wind. One of them is Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. This week, Bloomberg Green senior reporter Akshat Rathi speaks with CIP founder and managing partner Jakob Baruël Poulsen to understand how the industry is dealing with its many challenges, why CIP is still profitable and what will be needed for wind deployment to keep pace with climate goals.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producers are Tiffany Tsoi, Sommer Saadi and Magnus Henriksson. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim and Will Mathis. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, wind industry struggles and victories.
0:07.0	If you've heard anything about the wind industry in recent years, it's mostly bad news.
0:23.7	Building projects is becoming more expensive, getting government permission to build wind farms is taking much longer,
0:30.7	and big companies like Orsted, Vestus and Siemens are struggling.
0:36.8	But it's not all bad news.
0:39.2	There are still big players winning at the wind game.
0:43.2	One of them is Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
0:46.2	It's not as famous as other companies, but it's a big player.
0:49.9	Since 2012, CIP has raised $28 billion and it now has 150 gigawatts of clean energy projects in the pipeline.
1:01.4	That's roughly the size of the UK's electricity generation capacity under one company.
1:08.5	CIP is so big, in fact, that the company is now even talking about building artificial
1:13.6	islands out in the sea to further speed up the deployment of offshore wind power.
1:18.6	To understand how CIP is managing to navigate the challenges of the wind industry, I spoke to
1:24.6	one of its founders, Yaqub Baruel Poulson. He got his start building
1:28.7	offshore wind projects in what used to be Danish oil and natural gas and is now Orsted.
1:34.9	You can hear more of that story in a previous episode of Zero with Orsted CEO Mad Snipper.
1:41.3	Yaqab benefited from the initial wave of government subsidies given to offshore wind projects
1:46.1	by countries like the UK and Denmark. And then he used that success to create CIP and bring
1:53.0	in big investors such as pension funds and insurance companies to build even bigger offshore
1:59.4	wind projects. I spoke to Jakub at the World Economic Forum meeting this year in Davos.
2:04.6	To understand how the wind industry is dealing with the many challenges it faces,
2:09.6	why CIP has been so profitable, and what will be needed to keep deploying offshore wind to meet climate goals.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bloomberg, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Bloomberg and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.