00:00What can the Isle of Man, or the people of the Isle of Man, expect in terms of benefit for jobs, anything like that?
00:07Yeah, so just before we talk about jobs, of course the benefits to the people of the Isle of Man will be through tax,
00:16it'll be through the rental payments that we'll be paying based on the revenue that comes from selling the electricity we generate.
00:22We're also setting up a community benefit fund, and perhaps we'll come back to that in a minute.
00:27But also jobs, and I think that's a very important element. We'll be operating the wind farm from the Isle of Man,
00:33and that will create technician jobs, 30 plus really good quality jobs which will endure for the lifetime of the wind farm, which is 35 years plus.
00:40So, an exciting opportunity, we've seen that be a very important part of our presence in other areas where we've built offshore wind farms,
00:49so very excited about what that will mean for people here in the Isle of Man.
00:52This is the first offshore wind farm project potentially the Isle of Man could have.
00:58I would guess that would mean, unless somebody from the Isle of Man has travelled to work on a similar project somewhere else in the UK,
01:05we might not have that kind of specialism here to do that.
01:11Is Orsted's plan to establish some sort of training to go with it,
01:15or can we expect people from other parts of the UK to come here and work on this Isle of Man?
01:21Yeah, I mean the good thing about the way we've approached training for our turbine technicians to date is that we have a fantastic apprenticeship programme.
01:29So we happen to run that from our bases in Grimsby and in Barrow, and Barrow's not that far away.
01:35So that's a conversation that we're already having with the team there.
01:39There's some intricacies around how it works because it's an English-based apprenticeship scheme,
01:43and the support for that comes from UK government and specifically to England.
01:49But that's something that we're talking about. We're also engaging with government and with other stakeholders about the chance to do more in the education space.
01:57So getting some of those STEM subjects put into our schools and into our higher education at UCM, etc.,
02:04and really emphasising that those conversations about people who need those skills for when we will need them in, let's say, seven, eight years' time,
02:13those conversations are already happening now, and it's triggering the thought to study those kind of things.
02:17I can't get away from the fact that not all the facilities you would need to train a technician are not here on the island.
02:22That is the case. But I wouldn't underestimate the number of conversations that we're having with people about how that's possible going forward.
02:29We see what the Isle of Man does in spaces like ship registry. We see it in the tech space.
02:35We've seen it in the insurance industry and e-commerce over the years.
02:39It can really punch above its weight when it comes to having a reputation overseas.
02:43So a chance for us to talk about renewable energy right in the middle of the Irish Sea,
02:47with everything that's going to be happening in this geographical location in terms of offshore wind,
02:52it's a huge opportunity that we hope the Isle of Man will grab with both hands.
02:56Maybe we can just add to that. So particularly coming back to the apprentices,
03:00one of the things that we've, I think, got right is bringing people from all around the world where we set up new offshore wind businesses.
03:08I think of Taiwan in particular. I think of the northeast of the US.
03:12We've brought those training technicians over to our UK bases where they can get experience for several months
03:19and then they've gone back to work on their local wind farm.
03:22So we absolutely don't export the people.
03:25We export the skills by bringing the people to where the skills are, training them up,
03:29and then they can go back to wherever it is that they're based.
03:32Is that a similar system, the visage, happening with Moorland if it goes ahead?
03:39Absolutely. I mean, it's several years away, but we will need to start planning actually quite soon for developing that workforce
03:46that's going to be ready to start operating the wind farm as soon as it's commissioned,
03:50and that we would expect them to work with colleagues in other markets where there are wind farms already
03:55to actually learn their trade on other wind farms and then bring those experiences and skills back to the Isle of Man.
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