Media Isle of Man had the honour of being part of Energy Sustainability Centre's recent 'Roundtable' session, organised by MMC and hosted by Capital International Group.
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00:00Any development has an impact on nature, but I go back to an earlier point,
00:07Manx Wildlife Trust are 100% that the island needs renewable energy.
00:12So if you take that as a start point, we need to live, we need energy, we need to get it somewhere.
00:18We think renewable energy is the way to do it, we want the right renewables in the right place.
00:22So we've done some due diligence on Orsted, I've met with colleagues from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust,
00:28the CEOs there that have been working with Orsted for a long time, and frankly they give Orsted a fantastic reference,
00:34and there's huge biodiversity net gain projects there.
00:37Now we know Orsted are a company that are making money, but they're ethically making money on something we support.
00:44The question then is, it was really good to hear John say that in the Isle of Man,
00:48because we're an independent nation, we've got the opportunity to do it differently.
00:52So we're nudging Orsted in a way, in a nice way, because we're saying we want our wind farm,
00:57you do great things for biodiversity, but we want ours to blow the others away,
01:01and this to be the best ever wind farm that's ever been built for biodiversity.
01:06Now maybe, and there's barriers to this, and people wiser than me will say that this might not be possible,
01:11but whether that's a black blade, whether that's better things on the pillars underwater,
01:16maybe it's put in in such a way that the sound doesn't impact cetaceans when they're being built in the construction phase,
01:22whatever that looks like, we want our wind farm to be exemplar,
01:27and I want our government to be saying the same thing to Orsted,
01:31because then we work with the right partner who knows exactly how to build a wind farm,
01:35but we nudge them a bit to make ours the best in the world in terms of what biodiversity can look like in the wind farm.
01:41Amazing. Yep.
01:42And we've, you know, Orsted has been doing it for longer than anyone.
01:46We were the first company to put turbines in the water in 1991 in Denmark,
01:50and therefore that body of knowledge to where offshore wind is now and then where it's going to go next,
01:56the number of different projects and opportunities that we've got on our projects around the world
02:01that we've been sharing with Wildlife Trust and with many other organisations,
02:06there are so many things that sometimes people aren't aware of,
02:10but actually, you know, opportunities around the very simple fact that around turbine locations, of course,
02:16there's less disturbance because you don't have intensive fisheries going right up to the positions.
02:22And suddenly, I mean, I was up in Scotland last week and speaking to someone at the University of St Andrews,
02:28and they've been doing studies on grey sea movements around turbine positions
02:32because they discovered new feeding grounds because they're not being disturbed.
02:36There's so many different opportunities to do stuff that actually will leave a benefit.
02:41It's not the case of just coming in and enforcing a development.
02:44And this is, you know, the clues in the name, it's a man's name,
02:48but this is very much the Isle of Man's first offshore wind farm,
02:51but I want it to be the Isle of Man's offshore wind farm and done to suit the island from the end,
02:56because it's about the future here.