In the Uptime Spotlight today is Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, the company building the world's largest offshore wind farm with a government contract: Green Volt. Stephen discusses the massive project's progress, planning, and logistics to be completed by 2030.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, who is leading the charge in developing some of Europe's most ambitious floating offshore wind projects. Stephen brings over 25 years of energy industry experience and currently oversees Vårgrønn's Impressive portfolio of projects across Northern Europe, including Greenvolt, set to become the world's largest floating offshore wind farm with a government contract.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Steven, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, great to be here. Well, the Greenvolt project is one of the most important Impressive projects going on in the world right now, and you're heavily involved with that, of course, as being the CEO of Vårgrønn and I want to understand a little bit about how that project came together and what problem Greenvolt is trying to solve.

Stephen Bull: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's kind of neat to say it's the most exciting project. I think it's, uh, it's quite a scary project in many respects for us as well when you work within the offshore wind sector at the moment, but definitely within floating offshore wind. Yeah. If we sort of dial it back down to the project itself, I mean, what we're solving for here is, is the generic problem with offshore wind in deeper waters.

And, uh, and really when you start to push the boundaries beyond 60, you know, 60 odd plus, 70 meter water depths, you need to start to go into the floating territory. Um, and that's something that you find distinctly within the coast of Scotland as well. There's only so much of that seabed that is shallow and then it starts to push out there.

So, Scottish authorities, the Scottish Crown Estate, the guys who basically own the seabed license around there, want to have further developments within offshore wind, but um, they are inhibited in the sense that they have deeper waters. Um, at the same time, there's still a quite large oil and gas industry in, of Scottish waters as there is in Norway, as well as the two largest producers in Europe.

They also have carbon issues, carbon problems of CO2 emissions from their own Scope 1 emissions. So the Scottish authorities have put together a concept which is called targeted oil and gas. And essentially they've been looking to lease out areas where we could develop offshore wind, both that go straight into the grid.

For the benefit of consumers, but also could help decarbonize oil and gas operations as well. So that's the background around it. It's happened pretty quickly. To be honest, we, we received our, uh, you know, essentially our lease just over a year ago, year and a half ago. Uh, we won a contract for difference from the UK government in September.

Uh, for 400 megawatts and we're just basically right in the middle of procurement and developing the whole concept now so we could be online by 2030.

Allen Hall: Wow, that's a really short timeline.