So the next speaker is Dr. Kester Gunn of RWE, and he's already here. Hi Kester. Can you share your slides also?

Sorry, it's the first online presentation for this session. We need some time to set this up.

Hello, can you hear me? We can hear you. Excellent, then let me share my slides.

Super, I think it does work. You need to go to full screen mode.

You're ready to go. I'm ready to go, shall I start? Yep, so I'm Kester Gunn. I work at RWE Renewables. I am the technical lead for Airborne Wind. I'm just going to first say I'm very sorry I'm not there with you.

I've harvested these three photos from the previous three Airborne Wind conferences. There is a white X on each of them, which marks me. So it is sad that I can't be there in person, but I've been called upon to present some work at another workshop and another conference this week. So I'm joining you from sunny Brussels. I don't think RWE needs to be introduced to most of you.

We are one of the largest offshore generators in the world and pretty big onshore as well. We have 10 gigawatts of renewable generation and we're targeting having 50 gigawatts of renewable generation by 20 I think I'm actually supposed to say 2030. So we are ramping up fast.

We are on the lookout for new technologies. An awful lot of this is going to be offshore wind or onshore wind, so Airborne Wind is clearly of interest to us for that reason. We are in it for big commercial scale generation. A lot of you will probably also be aware that we have a test site. We've been developing islands.

That isn't actually what I'm presenting about today, but as people will probably want to know what's going on with that, we are still in the process of developing it. I will go to my next slide. So it is being built. These aren't the most up to date photos, but we have roads being built in. We have areas being flattened and reinforced ready for takeoff and landing. We don't know who we're going to be all of the users of that site yet. So we are still in the process of deciding who's going to be using this.

It should be operational pretty soon. It's a pretty big site. It has a large safety buffer. So yeah, it is still continuing forwards as we speak. So that brings us on to the topic I'm actually here to discuss with you today.

So RWE, we have tried a lot of novel technologies. Let me move myself out of the way so that you can see my picture. So when I joined EON originally, which has become part of RWE, and I joined specifically to look at offshore renewables in the form of

wave and tidal energy, we've tried floating wind, which we currently have three demonstration projects under development for floating wind. We have collaborated with several airborne wind companies. So these are the ones that I'm showing here. We've also done other things, concentrated solar. I have colleagues who worked on carbon capture and storage, for example.

So we've looked at literally hundreds of companies, probably well over 50 in the offshore renewables or novel renewables area. Some have been more successful than others. And what I would like to bring to you today is some of the lessons we've learned about what goes well and what doesn't go well when you are maturing these technologies.

So probably most people are aware of the concept of the technology readiness level. And probably most of the novel renewables companies there in the room have some idea of where you sit on this.

What I'm going to present today is very much inspired by the work of Jochen, who is, I believe, actually there and presenting this afternoon on what's your techno-economic aspects. So big thanks to him for letting me steal that picture. This is an example of what's been inspiring my work here. But what I would like to

focus on is that it's not just technology readiness level. It's in fact not even just technology readiness level and technology performance level. There are a lot of other aspects of the company that is developing the novel renewables, which have to develop in line with the technology.

As I go through these, I'll probably say some things which sound quite negative. I'd just like to stress that these really are learnings from a wide range of technologies. So if you hear me say something which sounds like I'm attacking an airborne wind company and you think you know who it is, you probably don't because it might well have been a wave energy company. So rather than just technology, your company needs to mature at the same rate. And what that

really means is your governance has to mature, the organization, the policies that you have in place to control risks. Your risk assessment methods need to mature. So the risk assessment for flying a kite is probably somebody looking at the sky and saying yeah it looks about

right. Whereas for flying an airborne wind device which could weigh a ton and if it crashes into a house will destroy it is clearly very different. So your risk assessment methods need to grow with your technology. Your commercial readiness needs to grow with the technology. And

people concentrate on sort of trying to push down the cost, which is obviously very important to us. But it's not just that. Your business model has to evolve and you also have to understand what your supply chain looks like. So if you want to build 500 of these in five years time, is that supply chain in existence? And if not, what needs to be done to develop it?

And lastly and probably one of the most important things is the people need to develop the technology. And so I will go through these in a bit more detail. It's probably worth thinking of these all as just being governance though. So governance is kind of the overarching thing. So the real takeaway I want you to get at the end of this is that as your

technology develops your company's governance needs to develop in line with it. And this sounds really dry and really unexciting but I promise you this is where we've seen an awful lot of failures in the whole renewable space. So governance, a very very dry subject. So what

is governance? Generally it comes down to organization, policy and process. So organization, what is the structure of your company and how have you set that up to achieve the goals you want? So for a small energy company you might have one CEO and a few people underneath you and as you move on to taking bigger risks and more complicated positions,

you need to develop your company. You will need entire departments looking at quality control etc. Policies, quite obviously you will need a HSE policy as soon as you start hiring people. That's basically a legal requirement but as you grow and start taking bigger and bigger risks

your HSE policy will grow with you and you'll need other policies. You'll need a policy about how you want to manage IP, how you're going to manage risks, how you're going to manage change. So developing these policies in line with the technology is very important and then finally processes is how you follow those policies. So having decided that you are going to have an

IP policy where you will put everything you need to put in place the processes to make sure that happens, who is going to actually do this, how are you going to find the funding to do it and all that sort of thing. So understanding the company structure as a whole and how that supports your technology development is very important. One particular example of this that

I find is very important for Airborne Wind is the modifications process. Now I pick on this one because it's actually one we don't do that well in conventional wind because we buy a wind turbine and we put it up and we do our best just to operate it as is and we try to avoid making changes because that's generating money for us. Whereas by the nature of the novel technology

development you're going to start flying your Airborne Wind device and after the first flight you're going to say well that didn't work very well let's mess with the control system, let's bolt on a new bit of cowling around the wind. So having an appropriate process to assess those changes that you make in the field is going to be vital and I'm sure you can understand

that if you're doing your very lightweight TRL level two first demonstrations that's not really a very complicated process. Whereas once you're out trying to do things, I mean Makani learns that when you're out in the ocean it doesn't take much for things to go very wrong very quickly. So understanding how you're going to assess your design, how you're

going to assess design changes, the implementations, what risk assessments you do and how you make sure those are proportionate to the modification you're making, how you're going to get those peer-reviewed. So who's going to look over these design changes and say yeah that's fine, do you do that internally or do you actually go out to one of the big engineering consultancies? I'm sure they

would all happily accept your money if you can find it. What non-destructive testing and inspection methods are you going to use to prove that your modifications have been done successfully? If you've welded a new bit on, is that weld appropriate? Has it got the voids in it?

And when you make these changes, how do you record lessons learned? So when you've made a change, if it went wrong, how do you make sure you capture that information to make sure it doesn't go wrong again? And all of this is relatively sensible for hardware but then the software part is even more complicated because you all have control software systems which could go very wrong and make your device crash. So what version control you have, what verification,

how do you do hardware-in-the-loop testing before you deploy control systems onto your device? So this is just an example of governance which I think is very particularly important for Airborne Wind. Risk and specifically HSE risk, how do you identify and manage risks? And I've split

that into three again. So hazards, what's your hazard identification process? Several of you have probably been involved in risk assessments with RWE or EON or one of my other former employees. You may have run hazards or hazards. These are all really good and you just need to make sure that those grow with the risk involved in your technology. We are currently in the

process of building floating wind turbines and these are thousands of tons of concrete or steel and we literally run a hazard for every single lift operation. So that gives you some idea that early we just hazard the device and say yeah that's about right but by the time we're building

thousands of tons of things that you could drop on somebody's head we hazard every single operation. So that gives you some idea of how things need to mature. Accidents will happen, how do you learn from them and then finally safe system of work. So this is another one which is very important as you start doing more and more testing. How do you make sure that the people

who are out there in the field are safe? How do you provide them with the right personal protective equipment? How do you get the appropriate training? But more importantly, how do you just generally control that field? So if somebody needs to go out there and modify your ground station, how do you isolate it from the electrical systems? Do you have padlocks on there so that nobody can accidentally switch it on while somebody is in there making

a modification? So safe systems of work and permits to work and that sort of system becomes more and more important for larger your device gets. Commercial business model is actually one that we will almost always ask you about when we first discuss this with you and it's surprising

how little, I mean it's not surprising, normal technology companies don't generally know how they want to mature. So you could want to become an OEM where you will be manufacturing and selling us these devices and that's fine. You could want to just develop the IP and then license it to a fabricator. You could decide you actually want to become an operator and actually directly compete

with the likes of RWE. We're less of a fan of that but we'll still support you if it looks like we can also buy them from you. Or you might want to just be acquired by one of the existing wind turbine companies and I'm not saying that any of these is the right way to go. I'm just saying that you need to understand these and you need to know how you're going to try and make those happen and it doesn't matter when which of these you think is sensible when you're a TRL2

but once you're up a TRL6 or 7 you probably want to be thinking about this. When you reach TRL9 hopefully you've already got it all sorted. And hand-in-hand with that, what is your target market? Are you going to be onshore or offshore? Are you just looking at small islands? Etc. Costs I won't focus on too much. That's pretty obvious. Get your costs lower, that's better.

Understanding your costs as a total is very important for this though. RWE love the idea of air and wind offshore on floating structures and we will probably keep telling you you're going to need more than one kite on each of your floating structures and that's simply because the balance of plant costs are very high. So putting in a foundation is expensive so the more generation

you have per foundation the better. So you only get that picture if you understand the full cost of your system including the bits that you don't you don't really find very exciting. And then finally supply chain just make sure you you have those supply chains lined up. A particular example of this which is going on at the moment is in floating wind. I don't know how involved

any of you have been in in seeing the floating wind works going on out there but for example the Scott wind leasing round that happened recently has gigawatts of floating wind being licensed off around Scotland. I don't think there are enough ports to support that and there's

going to be a real scramble to get those ports that port space ready so be aware of what you're going to need to commercialize. And then this is probably going to be one of the least popular things to say and I apologize if it looks like I'm being insulting by saying that in the early stage you're monkeys. What I mean is in the early stage of development you need people who

are dynamic and agile and can make decisions quickly and change things and that is brilliant and this is why I so love working with airborne wind and why I'm so sad not to be there with you all. But these behaviors do need to change as the risks go up and as you develop and you need

a more focused and more level-headed approach and it's sad to say that the people who are the great CEOs of normal renewable companies may not be the best people to be the CEO once you're actually trying to sell these things in large quantities. So you have to deal with this and

one of the ways you will deal with that is developing your people. You'll have to understand what competencies are needed and how you're going to train people into these competencies and you're also going to have to understand where you will find these extra behaviors and extra competencies. So can you can you hire them? Are they being developed? Are the universities training people for the skills and sets you're going to need? But I kind of think

one of the most important things is all of the dynamic people who are in the room there who are doing novel renewables and are so much fun to work with. How can you make sure that you are still valuable once you are selling a commercial product because you absolutely are valuable?

But yeah, the company will not work unless there's other more boring people in the room and it pains me that sometimes I have to be that boring person. So I'll come through that pretty quickly. I don't actually know how long I've taken but I presume we'll have plenty of time

for questions if anybody does have any questions. So my conclusions here is that as the technology matures your risks and your exposure to the market also matures and you need to develop the company along with the technical risk. There is no point in developing your

commercial readiness level, your governance readiness levels ahead of your technology because that is just a recipe to burn money. You will go bust before you achieve anything. So technology drives, you just need these other things to track the technology level appropriately. So yes, develop your company, develop your technology, just don't forget about

all of these other things that need to be developed. So any questions?

Thank you very much, Kester. Maybe unshare your screen because then we see you also speaking. Are there any questions? Maybe just one because we need to move on. No questions? Then I would say thanks again, Kester.