How does your work at Parkwind compare to your previous work?
I worked for a large utility company before I came to Parkwind but didn’t feel the real business impact of my job on a day-to-day basis. I was already active in the offshore wind industry and Parkwind had a great reputation. There was a vacancy at Parkwind that spurred my interest, so I applied.
I could immediately see that Parkwind was different. We don’t need to go to another department somewhere or in another city to get things solved. We can just go to the coffee machine and ask, “Hey, what do you think about this?”, and then we just get answers. We don’t need a lengthy approval process for every small design choice that we need to make. It makes us very agile which makes the process very efficient. You can just speak to each other and get things sorted. If you decide something, the next day it’s implemented. That’s one thing that keeps us on the edge.
How has your role evolved?
I started as a package lead in charge of the turbines for a specific project. Since then, my role has evolved quite rapidly and I was given the chance to lead a team of engineers. Nowadays my job consists in making sure that the right people are on the right project. I also safeguard the knowledge of how to build wind turbines, how to do the project management, and how to how to pick the best technology.
What is life like at Parkwind?
Parkwind is a young company and is very active and dynamic. On the project side of things, Parkwind evolves very rapidly. You constantly have to interact with colleagues and make things work quite quickly. At the end of the day, we’re building power plants and we’re doing that with a very passionate group of young, motivated people. They’re smart, they know what they’re doing and we have the senior managers to advise us. But at the end of the day, I really feel that that we are given a lot of responsibility as a young group of engineers to build large scale power plants out in the sea. It’s quite empowering to realize the impact of what you’re creating on the large infrastructure scale for a country.
I like my job, it keep evolving. The projects move forward, some have serious challenges to solve and we need to close them. It is a very energizing process.
How is your work rewarding?
We are very proud of the projects we deliver. They take 2-3 years to build and it’s rewarding to go offshore and stand with your feet on a turbine that you have managed.
What really gives me the energy to go to work every day is knowing that we’re working as hard as we can on being part of the future and, at the end of the day, decarbonizing the world.
Belgium is country which is an absolute forerunner in offshore wind. The first Belgian windfarms were some of the first worldwide and today Belgium is the number four in the world in terms of installed capacity with offshore wind. We are participating in global growth in offshore wind and offshore renewable energies. That is really what keeps me at Parkwind – knowing that we’re part of this bigger picture. We’re part of a long-term plan.
The EU wants 450 GW offshore wind by 2050 (today we have 26 GW). around that time I’ll be retiring and hopefully I can look back and know I have contributed to a better future.