2023 was a ‘record breaker’ for wind power in Ireland, but have we got the resources to reach the government's goals for a renewable future?

Today we learn about some of the engineering problems behind Ireland’s long-term strategy for increasing wind power, the challenges caused by policy, regulation and mother nature, along with a huge career drive to get more people, including engineers, working in the wind sector.

Our guest is extremely passionate about Ireland’s renewable energy potential. Also a chartered engineer, he uses his many years of experience fighting tirelessly to help us make the most of our natural resources and meet our sustainability targets for 2030. He is CEO of Wind Energy Ireland, Noel Cunniffe.

Listen below or on your podcast player:

THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

• How Ireland is leading the way and breaking records in wind energy generation
• Innovative engineering work happening in Ireland’s renewable energy sector
• Policy, planning permission, community engagement and other challenges facing the wind sector
• Offshore wind and why it’s Ireland’s energy future
• The Work In Wind recruitment drive and why engineers are needed

GUEST DETAILS
Noel Cunniffe is the CEO of Wind Energy Ireland which is Ireland’s largest renewable energy association and works with a wide range of stakeholders to build understanding and awareness of the benefits of wind and renewable energy. Prior to becoming CEO, Noel led Wind Energy Ireland’s Policy department in driving policy development across all aspects of the onshore and offshore renewable industry in Ireland.

Previously, Noel was the Renewable Integration Lead in EirGrid, the Transmission System Operator of Ireland, and worked across several departments including electricity grid planning and operation, and the design of the electricity market of Ireland. He is a Chartered Engineer with Engineer’s Ireland.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/noel-cunniffe-b34a1429

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

TRANSCRIPTION

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:00

Right now on AMPLIFIED, we're about to find out how Ireland is setting new records for wind power.

Noel Cunniffe  00:05

I know this is probably very bonkers to think about. But if we didn't have wind energy over the past two years, our electricity bills would have been much, much, much higher than they already were.

Dusty Rhodes  00:19

Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes and you're welcome to AMPLIFIED, the Engineers Journal podcast. 2023 was a record breaking year for wind power in Ireland and very shortly, you will be amazed to hear how much electricity we actually generate here from wind. Over the next half hour or so we're hoping to learn more about the engineering problems behind Ireland's long term strategy for increasing wind power. The challenges caused by policy, regulation and Mother Nature, along with a huge career drive to get more people including engineers working in the wind sector. Our guest is extremely passionate about Ireland's renewable energy potential. As a chartered engineer, he's been working in the area for a long time and fights tirelessly to help us make the most of our natural resources and meet our sustainability targets for 2030. I'm delighted to welcome to our AMPLIFIED podcast the CEO of Wind Energy Ireland. Noel Cunniffe, how are you Noel?

Noel Cunniffe  01:16

Very good Dusty, thank you very much for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:20

So listen, tell me about the wind power, because when I heard this fact, I was flabbergasted how much of our electricity is generated from wind? Yeah,

Noel Cunniffe  01:29

it's something that a lot of people in the country don't know is that we're actually a world leader when it comes to the amount of our electricity that comes from wind. So Ireland's story wind energy began back in the 90s, our very first onshore wind firm was built in 1992. So it's been operational for over 30 years now. And over that amount of time from the early 90s. Right up until 2023, we've built up more and more onshore wind, we've started with offshore wind with a bit more to go there would today. Or I should say maybe even last year in total over the course of the year, over 1/3 of Ireland's electricity came from winter. And as you can imagine, it's very weather dependent. So in some times of the year, like in December, which has just gone by over 50% of Ireland's electricity during the course of December came from wind. So during the Christmas period while everybody was cooking their turkeys, binging Netflix, you know, making ample amounts of tea and hot whiskies. One in two times when you are boiling a kettle turning on your TV using your internet, it was thanks to wind energy. How

Dusty Rhodes  02:33

are we generating so much? Because I would imagine if we're generating half of it that there should be massive propellers all over the country. I don't see that all over the country. How are we generating so much?

Noel Cunniffe  02:44

Yeah, well, last year was also a kind of quite a unique year, because for the very first time for a couple of times over the course of the year, all of Ireland's electricity at certain periods came from wind energy, mostly sunny evening and nighttime. So as I mentioned, like the very first wind farm was built in mail in 1992. And it was really in the kind of mid 2000s, to the teens that we started to accelerate wind energy. So particularly kind of 2015 to 2020. And we're continuing to do that. So today to kind of get into some of the figures, we have just under five gigawatts of wind energy installed on our grid. So to put that into context, the peak electricity demand that we have in Ireland, over the course of a year is about six, maybe about six and a half gigawatts. So we nearly have all of our electricity demand that could be met at peak by wind energy today. And our goal then for 2030 is to try and move that onshore wind target from nearly five gigawatts up to about nine gigawatts. And then for offshore wind energy, we're really at a standing start with one very small offshore wind farm off the coast of virtual. And we have to go from that standing start up to about five gigawatts by 2030. So we have a lot of work to do. But thankfully, we've one of the best industries here in the world to be able to deliver upon that we've got some brilliant engineers, brilliant planners, brilliant, brilliant economists, they're working tirelessly on this. And then investment is really there to try and drive it on and deliver that wind energy goal for Ireland.

Dusty Rhodes  04:17

With all of this going on, it has been such a success, then, tell me how does wind energy work from an engineering point of view out as a word? I mean, where do you set up the farms? How many do you need? How big are they give me some give me some of the practicalities? Yeah,

Noel Cunniffe  04:32

sure. So I think when the sector was initially starting off, you needed quite a few turbines to generate, you know, relatively speaking, not that much electricity. So the original wind farms in Ireland were predominantly based on the west coast. So we're talking Donegall Mayo Carey, where there would have been that very strong Atlantic wind coming in. Typically they would have been located on the site of mountains or Hilda to try and again be exposed capture as much of that wind energy as possible. So the turbines are obviously spinning, then when the wind is blowing, that's then converted into electricity on site. So each of the turbines would have a generator within them. And then that turbine is then connected into the electricity grid. So the grid is, is pretty much the transportation system for how electricity gets from where it's generated, be it in a wind farm, or a solar farm or a gas generator, to then our homes and our businesses and our towns and our cities. So every single electrical device that you have in your house, be at your leisure, or your cattle, your your laptop, that's actually connected to the electricity grid in a direct path, right away through to every single wind farm in our country. So that's how the electricity grid is the heartbeat of how we we power Ireland and how we generate it. And then it's really the wind energy that helps to provide as much of that power as possible from indigenous domestic sources, which is zero carbon emitting, and ideally, kind of keeping as much of that revenue and money that's being put into the wind energy and I and the guests coming out of it, then within Ireland, that's the advantage compared to perhaps where we would have historically produced our electricity by importing oil and gas, you know, not only is that emitting carbon emissions driving up our energy costs, because we're so reliant on it. But it is also then that money is leaving Ireland and exiting and then going off to those countries that are producing prostitutes.

Dusty Rhodes  06:33

Tell me more about the physical side of it. Because you said wind farms on the side of mountains now I can understand because you're attaching these these huge constructions to the land. But then you mentioned several in the Atlantic Ocean. How do you put these into the Atlantic Ocean? Yeah,

Noel Cunniffe  06:52

so for onshore wind, they kind of Yeah, it started on the hills. I think the technology is probably moved on so much now that the turbines are so efficient that you can kind of put them in places where you probably weren't thinking about previously, and that includes in the sea. Ireland was actually again, one of the world's first developers of offshore wind energy. It was the the late Grace Eddie O'Connor, who's recently pastor, his company, SSE Airtricity, in the early 2000s, decided to go out on a limb and really try and see could we do something with offshore wind energy, and they built the first offshore wind farm in Arklow. Bay in Wicklow. At the time, it was the largest offshore wind firm in the world. So there's two different types of offshore wind firms. There's fixed bottom offshore wind farms recalled and then there's floating offshore wind farms. So, the technology predominantly today, including that one in Arklow is fixed bottoms, where the turbines themselves are fixed to the floor of the seabed, be it through piles or through other types of almost lattice tower constructions. And they can be deployed in depths that are out to about maybe 6070 meters deep. So around Ireland or East Coast and are so cost when you get off the get into the sea Leto. Our depths tend to go out for about maybe 12 Miles 20 Miles at that depth of you know 50 To 60 meters, so you can deploy the fixed bottom technology there. Once you get out further into the say the outline of the Atlantic or off the south coast tends to get deeper faster. But we do have the continental shelf which is a real advantage for us when it comes to floating offshore wind energy. So floating offshore wind energy is a technology which anchors to the seafloor using an anchor that you might see in a ship, for example, to put it simplistically, and then the turbines are on the water and kind of floating along with the waves and you can deploy them to a greater depth.

Dusty Rhodes  08:46

So would it work something like an oil rig in the North Sea? Not

Noel Cunniffe  08:51

too dissimilar, exactly, very similar type of technology minority tend to be again, depending on where you are. Europe has the advantage of shallower waters for a much greater extent so they can play fixed bottom in areas that we couldn't floating offshore wind energy is a technology that there's a huge amount of research going into it at the moment. Some of the best researchers in Ireland actually in colleges right around our coastlines are working on floating offshore wind energy, I present, I think it's going to be a really big technology for Ireland's future, particularly when we get into that kind of second half of the 2030s 2040s 2050s. It will be our predominant offshore wind technology in that type of time prep. Now,

Dusty Rhodes  09:30

we're talking huge numbers about what it's able to generate as an overall percentage of our electricity usage. Do you think that Ireland could ever be 100% reliant on renewable energy and just not use oil? Who

Noel Cunniffe  09:43

100% Definitely no doubt about that it will happen. I think a lot of the decisions that are being made today from a policy perspective are going to decide when that happens. I get asked a lot. What happens when the wind doesn't blow. You know, where does our backup come from? And then the short term, the answer is going to be gas generation. That's that's the least polluting fossil fuel that we have. That's what we should be using, we should not be using oil, we should not be using coal, unless it's an absolute emergency. But in the longer term you with different portfolios of renewable technology, so the wind blows differently onshore than it is offshore, for example. So if it's not blowing onshore, it might be blown offshore, and vice versa. So you those can kind of balance each other. And then similarly, for solar generation, you know, it's most windy in Ireland in the winter, when it's we have storms in the evenings are long and nighter obviously longer as well. So we don't have that much solar generation. But then the times when maybe it isn't as windy in Ireland is the come summer periods for We've lots of sun. And that's where solar generation can really help balance wind. So if you can combine those two types of technologies, and then the key thing is how you can store that energy over time. So Ireland is brilliant when it comes to rolling out battery energy storage as well. Again, it's probably an unknown success story that we have here, where we can store wind and solar energy for periods of about maybe it's up to about maybe 30 minutes to two hours at the moment, that's where the technology is. But more and more of that technology is moving towards multi hour, overtime, multi day storage. So you can and we will get to a point in time where wind and solar energy when it's windy and Sunny will be powering our country. And when it's not, we'll be relying on stored energy from renewables to try and generate that electricity, be it through battery energy, storage hydrogen or some other format.

Dusty Rhodes  11:39

Why is it only 30 minutes to two hours, because I'm thinking in my head, a much bigger version of a rechargeable battery that I would have in my home, okay, so I can recharge that battery, and it goes to whatever 100% And then I can leave it sitting around on a shelf for a couple of weeks, and then put it into a radio or whatever it is that I'm going to be using on it and it works. Why can you not do that with super big batteries for wind energy? Yeah,

Noel Cunniffe  12:07

it's a really good question. I guess the simple answer is that the engineers that ruin our power system in air grid and an ESB networks, we've got, again, some of the best engineers in the world, we're operating an island electricity grid, with pockets of renewable energy, I can't tell you how unusual that is, for all the electricity grid nerds out there like myself, it's brilliant. But one of the big challenges with that tends to be trying to respond to short term problems. So for example, if you're running your electricity grid, you constantly need to have the the supply of electricity balanced with the demand for electricity, that so our safe power system works. There's constant supply balance. And if you have a power plant that we trip off, for example, all of us are aware that, you know, in certain circumstances, our electricity might trip and we'd go to the fuse board and we'd see switched out. Power plants operate in a very similar manner where you might have a gas generator trip off the grid, for example. And that power needs to be replaced very quickly. And that's where the batteries come in. So our engineers and our grid have incentivized the building of short duration batteries to try and solve that problem. Now, the longer term batteries that you're talking about the kind of multi hour multi day batteries, that problem is now starting to be realized as something that we need to tackle. And the technology is starting to come there. I would say, you know, if you were tried trying to do this 10 years ago, it would have been quite expensive. Whereas now the technology is coming there, there's multitudes of different types, be it through traditional battery be a true hydrogen be a true kind of using what's called flow batteries, which are using liquid to try and store energy. So that technology has come in and again, by the end of the decade, we're going to have a lot of it deployed right around Ireland to try and help balance that supply demand issue to make sure that we maximize renewable energy. Can

Dusty Rhodes  13:56

I ask you about the cost of it sounds amazing. All right, but I'm just thinking of my ESP bill. Okay. So, you know, traditionally is quite high with tradition, we've been quite reliant on oil and gas. I know that in countries where they have nuclear power, the electricity bills tend to be cheaper with these wind turbines. Are we going to see an improvement with our bills?

Noel Cunniffe  14:14

We already are? It's a quick answer. So like, I know, this is probably very bonkers to think about. But if we didn't have wind energy, over the past two years, our electricity bills would have been much, much, much higher than they they already were. So everyone around the country homes and businesses have experienced the pain of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and what that then meant for energy security in Europe and energy supply in Europe and Ireland's price was really dictated because of our reliance on imported fossil fuels. If you can just look at the energy ecosystem as a whole not just electricity, but heat and transport as well. We still import about 85% of all of our fuel And then from oil and from gas. And those price spikes were extraordinary wind energy helped to push the most expensive oil and gas off the electricity grid, we produce a report every single month, which looks at the amount of wind which was generated in the month previous, but also looks at them the price of electricity on the wholesale market, on the days when we had the most wind and the days when we had the least amount of wind. And what you typically see is that on the days, when we we have wind energy available, the price tends to be you know, half of that of the day when we don't have wind energy available. So Wind energy has been protecting us to try and minimize the impact of our of our bills, clearly, more needs to be done. And the more that we can roll out renewable energy, not just wind solar as well, to try and push off that fossil fuels make us less reliant on imports, more reliant on our own domestic supply where we control the price, then we're in for a win. And that's what I think we should be striving for. As a country.

Dusty Rhodes  15:57

If someone is interested in getting these reports that you produce monthly, are they available online? Anywhere? Is it just an internal industry thing, no

Noel Cunniffe  16:05

wind energy ireland.com we produce the reports every month, typically, there's there's usually reports in media on them, as well. So I think it's something that more people have become aware of. It's something that we're constantly trying to do to try to, I guess, promote the industry, like one of our biggest challenges over the next 10 years or so is going to be trying to bring people into our sector to try and deliver the objectives that we have. When it comes to onshore wind and offshore winds and the electricity grid and rolling that out further, we simply don't have enough engineers, we don't have enough planners, we don't have enough energy economists in the sector at the moment to deliver the targets that we have in 2030 and beyond. So promoting what wind energy does on a monthly basis is part of almost our long term recruitment campaign to train in, bring people in, be it people looking for new careers, or students in primary secondary students and thinking about what a successful career might look like for them in the future. listening

Dusty Rhodes  17:03

to you talk about wind energy, it all sounds amazing. However, a lot of people object if they find out that a wind farm is going to be set up in their area, what are their concerns? Why do they not like this? Yeah,

Noel Cunniffe  17:18

so I think we as a sector have learned an enormous amount when it comes to community engagement over the past 1015 years, I think we could have done better with engaging with communities in probably, you know, the 2010s, of what we've taken on board, a lot of that feedback, and that opposition. And what we're seeing on doorsteps today is a much more understanding. And I think we've gotten better at engaging with communities identifying what their concerns are, and then adapting projects.

Dusty Rhodes  17:50

What are the concerns? What What are they saying to you on the doorstep.

Noel Cunniffe  17:53

So a lot of the times, it could be things like, you know, related to scenery, or the impact of perhaps tourism in an area or just a general uncertainty around perhaps the noise of wind energy. But there's lots of evidence to show that, you know, from a health point of view, there is no impact when it comes to having a wind farm near your house. When it comes to noise I the current kind of noise guidelines that are there for the industry, a winter by needs to be quieter than a refrigerator outside your home. And then when it comes to tourism, there is multiple reports showing that zero impact on tourism and in fact, many wind farms now they're becoming tourist amenities. Because I know myself, I'm based in the Midlands, I have multiple wind farms that are near me, which now have community walking tracks, which have, you know, activities for kids playgrounds in their locations. And we really encourage people to go and please go and visit a wind farm and go and experience it and see it for yourself. Many of them are open right around the country. And when you take that kind of general sentiment towards wind energy, I think as we look at particularly what we've been through in the last two years, with the energy price crisis that we've seen, more and more people recognize that the solution to high energy prices, the solution to energy security and the solution to decarbonisation is domestically produced renewable energy and for Ireland, our best answer for that is wind energy. So we carry out a an independent polling of people around Ireland every single year to try and understand what their concerns are and what they perceive as the benefits of wind energy. This year, about four and five people are in favor of wind energy, and about one in 20 are opposed to it. So if you try to find anything in Ireland, where one in 20 people will not oppose something I would really like to see that. So I think those figures Yeah, it is rare, but those figures have kind of increased over time and gotten stronger and stronger as people I've seen the benefits of wind energy, and more people are probably experienced when firms in their area and the benefits that they can bring.

Dusty Rhodes  19:56

Is there anything in it for people who are living near wind farms and mean, is there a financial incentive? Or do they get free electricity or anything like that?

Noel Cunniffe  20:03

Yeah, like many, many companies are offering different things, there's a couple of things that are kind of mandatory called near neighbor payments. So there will be things that if you're located near a wind farm, there will be a payment associated with that. There's also a really good scheme that has been brought in by the government in the past few years called community benefit funds, where if you are a community near a wind farm, then there will be a fund created for you every single year. And then it's up to that community to decide how that money is spent. So, for example, in I think it was 2020, to about 4 million euro went into community benefit funds around Ireland, and that helped to pay for things like investment in GA investment in nursing homes, on top of all of that as well, again, something that a lot of people wouldn't be aware of is that all of these wind farms that we have in Ireland are paying annual rates to county councils. So there's many counties around Ireland that have 10 to 20% of their entire income for the year coming from wind farms and their location. So that's helping to pay for, for schools, for libraries for roads in all of these counties around Ireland. So again, there's a lot of hidden benefits there that people are not seeing. But it shows the overall economic benefit to Ireland, of producing our own energy if we can.

Dusty Rhodes  21:22

Let's talk more about the engineering side of things. What factors do you have to consider when you are looking for somewhere to build a wind farm? What are the kinds of things that goes through the head? Really,

Noel Cunniffe  21:35

really good question. So I would say originally, when wind farms were being looked at, it was all about where's the windiest areas and where's the, you know, the best wind speed and that's what led a lot of wind farms originally to be generated or created on the West Coast and on mountainous regions. More and more, though, because of the advancements in the turbine technology. Ireland is just so windy everywhere compared to other countries, you can kind of you could legitimately put a turbine anywhere, if you were only looking at wind speed. So I don't think that that's as big a criteria now as it used to be. So things that are important are things like the most important one currently is actually access to the electricity grid. So where is our electricity grid strong enough that you can connect a wind farm into it, and then your power can be sent out anywhere in the country. So more and more projects are looking at the future of our electricity grid, where projects are going to be to try and expand capacity there. And then they're trying to locate wind farms in those regions. So that's run onto it. For offshore wind, a lot of those decisions are now being made by the government. So we have what's we're moving towards what's called a plan lead system for offshore wind energy, where the government will engage in multiple consultation processes to do a lot of environmental screening assessments, and then identify areas of the costs these costs. So cost the west coast of Ireland for offshore wind energy to be developed. And then developers will participate in in competitive processes, be it through an auction system or something equivalent to then be selected as the company to build the wind firm in that government selected reach.

Dusty Rhodes  23:20

No, let me ask you in particular about offshore wind, you kind of believe that this is the big growth area or this is the answer why

Noel Cunniffe  23:30

100% This is Ireland's energy future. As I mentioned, we've only one small offshore wind farm in Ireland. At present, we're trying to develop about seven to 10 offshore wind farms in the next 10 years. So we have a lot of work to do there. A lot of people again, wouldn't realize this. But if you look at the total economic area that Ireland has available to it, we have a C area that seven times our land mass in our control. So Ireland is one of the largest countries in Europe when you take that into account, but seven, eight of us are underwater. And that creates a lot of challenges, but a lot of opportunities. And if you combine that large sea area with one of the windiest countries on the planet, are a capability for offshore wind energy is just incredible. Be that through supplying our own domestic energy supply, which is the the I guess the the first goal of that in the next 1015 years or so. But then by 2050, we are going to be a battery for Europe. We're going to be supplying electricity, not just for Ireland, we're going to be exporting that into Europe. We're going to be utilizing that clean energy to create new products, new manufacturing bases, right around the coastlines of Ireland. Now you can really see this being something that a lot of people are getting very excited about in the areas like Rosslare and cork in Wexford in Limerick Galway. There's a lot of investment going into our ports. There's a lot of investment going into our education ecosystems in those areas to try and make sure that we have the people ready to capitalize on the is and what it will mean for Ireland in the next 2030 years. It's a massive economic opportunity.

Dusty Rhodes  25:05

Another thing that we have to worry about when you're looking at our location is of course planning permissions, the bane of everybody's life. There's delays, I'm sure in the in the sector, how's that? How's it affecting your goals?

Noel Cunniffe  25:20

So the planning system is definitely the biggest challenge, I would say that our industry is facing at the moment, it tends to be with projects that apply for planning permission, it's the uncertainty of when those projects are going to come out on the other side, which is the biggest challenge, if you apply for planning permission today to be on board Panola. For example, there is a statutory guideline timeline in there of about 18 weeks that a project should be decided upon. But on average, it's more like 90 weeks when a project gets decided upon. So it's a significant time increase. What I think Ireland needs when it comes to unlocking energy independence and delivering more renewable energy is investment in our planning system, not in people and in resources and in skill sets. And it's not just in the likes of and more Panola, or local authorities than their planning departments. It's in the National Parks and Wildlife Service. It's in the environmental NGOs to help to decide how projects determine how plan permissions are determined for projects. I think when a lot of people hear me speaking about the planning system, they automatically think, Oh, they're just asking for a simpler, right through the planning system. That is absolutely not the case, the planning system gets decisions through it just gets them through at a really slow pace compared to what we need to be doing to be able to deliver upon our targets. So the more people that are in there that can help make decisions faster, be it positive or negative for one firm, the better. And I think it extends out just to the to the wind energy sector, like I think, like one big important thing for Ireland, they'd probably be like number two on the list of the challenges that need to be overcome is our electricity grid down investment there. So air grid and ESB networks have brilliant plans really good plans to try and upgrade Ireland's electricity system for 2014 for 2030 for 2014. But they're going to be running into this roadblock now very soon. So yeah, unlocking that planning system through more people, and through more effective policies to enable renewable energy I think is going to be important.

Dusty Rhodes  27:24

I was actually just about to ask you about the infrastructure. Because of so much energy has been generated by wind and has been put into our grid as it is it sounds like we could lead to overload. So what is it that they need to do to improve our grid?

Noel Cunniffe  27:36

So grid is is I think, traditionally been something that Ireland hasn't done great at in terms of accepting as a con as a country. Ireland's electricity grid began again, probably in the 1920s going up to the 1950s, huge investment in the 1980s in our grid and an early 1990s. And we had almost an overbilled of grid in the 1980s and 1990s. And that gave us headroom. And we've used all of that headroom over the last 20 years through our country growing our economic economy expanding through the rollout of renewable energy. We're really at the point now where we as a country need to get in, jump in and invest in grid again. And that means building overhead lines, underground cables, new substations, it is the the heartbeat of a thriving economy, and decarbonisation and ensuring that our lights stay on. So we need a grid. It's not just the planning system, that's going to be an issue there. I think it's political support. When you look back at plans that, you know, tried to build our electricity grid in the late 2000s. In in the teens, they really failed because of a lack of political support for projects progressing into the planning system and through a planning system. So we actually helped to establish a campaign last year which engineers Ireland are also involved in, and it's called build our grid. And it's trying to build awareness for the benefits of having a strong electricity grid and what that means for economy for decarbonisation for our security of supply. And the more people that recognize that we do need to invest in our grid, the better.

Dusty Rhodes  29:12

Can you give me some examples of specific physical infrastructure that we're going to need.

Noel Cunniffe  29:17

So apart from the turbines and the panels, I think you're talking about it is really getting into that overhead power lights, it is really getting inside all underground cables and a new electricity. This electricity substations, battery energy projects, also going to be really important. They tend to be shipping containers is almost what they look like. So they're, they're in an enormous footprint. One of the most interesting infrastructure projects that we're going to need as well, when you start to look outside of Ireland is our ability to connect to other electricity grids. So Ireland is currently what's called interconnected to Britain. We have one line joining just north Dublin into England. And then we have another one connecting Northern Ireland, Scotland, we're going to be recurrently, building two more represent another one connecting into Britain, our Connecting another one into France in 2027. These are huge infrastructure projects, multi billion euro projects. And they need to be delivered again by about 2030. So I think it's a bit of everything, there is huge amount of private and public investment that is going into this to huge transformation for what we need to see in our electricity system. But I guess the benefit of all of this is that we're going to have a clean source power, because the best way to decarbonize the heat and transport sectors is to put a plug on things, the more you can put a plug on all aspects of your life for your business, then the lower carbon is going to be so that means to plug in our transport, which electric vehicle electric bus, put a plug on your heating with a heat pump. And that way Ireland can decarbonize not just electricity sector, but also the heat transport sectors too, which is a big challenge.

Dusty Rhodes  31:01

And let me ask once again, about here in Ireland, when there is no wind in the summer, or solar when there is no sun ever. There's a word for that. When we don't have wind or sun, what is the word?

Noel Cunniffe  31:13

It's a German word. It's called dunkel floater. Where does that come from? Great question. I don't know the answer to that one. But, but it is it is often raised. So the idea behind it is it's a calm, cooled period where there isn't wind, and it's very cloudy, so there isn't much sun. And these types of periods can sometimes last for multiple days. And that's the real goal for people working in the you know, particularly the research side of the renewable energy sector, how can we power our grids or homes or businesses shoring those times using renewable energy, when we might not when we we won't have wind or we won't have solar available. So I think in the short term, it's going to be doing as much as we can with things like batteries, but then needing to rely on gas generation. And that's probably going to be the case for the next 10 years or so, in the longer term. The kind of the Great White hope, let's say for the power sector is is in hydrogen, and in what's called E fuels, so electric fuels. So hydrogen is quite interesting. You can use renewable energy to separate water h2o into its components h2, hydrogen and oxygen. And then you can use that hydrogen gas in the same way that you would current gas that we have in positive gas on our on our grid, so you can burn it in power plants, you can burn it in various devices, and the only output of that is not carbon emissions, it's its water. So that's what the kind of the goal is in the long term to move to that. Now that technology is a bit off. It's certainly not something that we're going to be deploying at a wide scale in the 2030 tight timeframe. But it is something that we should be looking into as a country and we are looking into we do have a hydrogen strategy. And you can then use that hydrogen to create other types of fields, be it ammonia, or different types of fertilizers that could be used again in other industries or tell power, for example, like sustainable aviation fuels to help decarbonize our aircraft sector, or even ammonia is being used and chipping at the moment too. So again, lots of progress to be seen there in the next few years. I'm sure.

Dusty Rhodes  33:26

Renewable energy is a huge growth area in Ireland from everything that you were saying. A lot of jobs, which, you know, is no surprise, where are the engineering jobs.

Noel Cunniffe  33:39

The engineering jobs are really interesting. So my background is civil engineer, but I transitioned into electrical engineering. And I would say you can find an engineering job anywhere in the renewable energy industry, be that civil engineering, where if you're looking to construct, say, a wind turbine, or a wind farm, and electricity grid corridor, and electricity substation, we are excellent in Ireland, when it comes to electrical design, we've got some of the best companies in the world that we're exporting abroad here. When it comes to electrical design. If you are a mechanical engineer, there's lots of really interesting problems and challenges that we're trying to solve with maximizing wind energy, solar energy, looking at things like how we deploy offshore wind energy off the coast of Ireland, and in floating wind in particular is a technology that we really need to get to grips with what a lot of the research centers are looking at at the moment. And then electrical engineers, again, we have some of the best electrical engineers in the world work on our power system in our grid, Denise networks in companies right around Ireland. So I couldn't recommend a career in this sector more to anyone that would like to get into it to help kind of promote the sector. We actually launched an initiative in October last year. It's called work in wins daata eak. And it's really geared towards people that want to perhaps try a career in the renewable energy sector or to second level students who might be filling out their SEO application forms in the coming weeks and thinking, how am I? What's my career going to be? So on that website, you can actually take a short quiz. And you can say, are you more analytical? Are you more into history? Are you more into English? Do you like working outside? Do you like working inside you like working with people? Do you like working by yourself. And then depending on what the quiz results come up with, it'll give you a selection of jobs that are available in the industry, and a number of college courses that are available right around Ireland to help you get into those careers. So it's something that we're going to be given a quite a big push on over the coming weeks. And hopefully, it'll attract people into our sector, because we need people. It's definitely the top of the risk register for a lot of companies in our sector. How do we get the right people in?

Dusty Rhodes  35:48

Give me the URL for that website again?

Noel Cunniffe  35:52

Yeah, so it's working wind.ie? Please do check it out, and promote it to anyone that you know that's in school or thinking about applying for jobs in the near future. There's loads of information on that website.

Dusty Rhodes  36:05

workinwind.ie, a very easy one to remember. I like it. Noel, I have to say, it's been a fascinating conversation with you today, because I've seen wind farms around and had a passing kind of wonder, you've just filled in so much. And it sounds amazing. And I'm just astounded at what we are producing at the moment through wind, and I suppose also solar and then also what the plans are for the next. I was about to say 10 years, but I'm mean 2030 is not that long away. It's only six years away. So I mean, it's very much happening and growing fast. And I'll tell you, that website is definitely going to be one that I'll be checking out workinwind.ie. Of course, if you'd like to find out more about Noel and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes about what we were chatting about and other link details including contacts for note in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Noel Cunniffe, CEO of Wind Energy Ireland. Thank you for joining us.

36:59

Thank you very much.

Dusty Rhodes  37:02

If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share it with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening

Engineering Is Fundamental To Enterprise

Irish engineers are having a fantastic impact in global enterprise but are we nimble and innovative enough to take on the internationals?

Today we find out how engineering is fundamental to the future of enterprise in Ireland and why innovation and sustainability will be vital to our success.

We are delighted to be joined by CEO of Enterprise Ireland, and Fellow of Engineers Ireland, Leo Clancy.

 Listen below or on your podcast player!

Things we spoke about

01:26 Leo’s career from engineering to enterprise 

04:17 What does Enterprise Ireland do?

05:25 Engineering is fundamental to enterprise

08:38 How Ireland stands out in a global market

11:47 What we can learn from international companies

14:28 Adopting an innovation mindset

18:09 How Enterprise Ireland can help start ups

22:58 Opportunities for Irish engineering companies

25:29 Sustainability as an opportunity and as a threat

33:41 Future forecasting and Impact 2030 for engineering

Guest details

Leo Clancy is the Chief Executive Officer of Enterprise Ireland, the State Agency that helps Irish companies to start, scale and grow globally. Leo graduated from Dublin Institute of Technology with a First-Class Honours degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and is a Fellow of Engineers Ireland.

Before being appointed as CEO of Enterprise Ireland, Leo was a member of the Executive Committee of IDA Ireland, the State agency for Foreign Direct Investment. There, he led the Technology sector, working extensively at up to C-level with the top global technology and services companies.

Leo spent most of his career in the telecommunications industry, working in senior management, technical and engineering roles. His most recent role was as Service Delivery Director at e|net. Prior to that, he was General Manager, Service Delivery at Ericsson Ireland.

Website: https://www.enterprise-ireland.com/en/about-us/our-people/executivecommitee/leo-clancy.html

Social Media: www.linkedin.com/in/leoclancy

More information

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/ 

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

Quotes

It was that discipline of learning about something and problem solving that I really appreciated about engineering, and I think gives you a great grounding. I've been a manager effectively now for 20 years. You never lose that engineering mindset in terms of how you approach problems, and I think it really stands to people. - Leo Clancy

Irish companies and people have a get it done mentality. We are flexible, we know how to roll with things and problem solving is at the core of how we think about things. Ireland has always had that little bit of a scrappy edge to us, and that shouldn't be confused with low quality because it's not. Irish people are good at analyzing the problem, working out how to change the process in order to get it done, as well as delivering quality. - Leo Clancy

I think we could certainly bring back more of that cultural respect for engineering. We need to value engineering more. - Leo CLancy

There's some brilliant innovation going on in Ireland. And I think it's not beyond the possibility for Irish companies in various domains who are already strong on services and delivering projects to start innovating solutions within their businesses. - Leo Clancy

We're going to see continued and vastly increasing investment in sustainability. That is certainly something that every company should be looking at, as an opportunity, but also as a threat. If companies don't have sustainability plans, and verifiable ones for their businesses, they will be out of business in three to five years. No one will buy from a company that doesn't have a good ESG plan, and that can't verify their own sustainability credentials. - Leo Clancy

It's an absolute testament to Irish business that 2022 was a record year on exports. Irish business performed very well during the pandemic, so I'd be very optimistic about where we're going in the future. I think notwithstanding what might happen in the global markets, I think we're going to continue to see growth in Irish business exports, and growth and jobs. - Leo Clancy

Transcription

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes 00:00

Right now on AMPLIFIED, the Engineers Journal podcast, we're about to learn just how important innovation is for success.

Leo Clancy 00:08

Irish engineers would go to sites, and we'd figure out how to get the job done. We wouldn't stand behind. Well, this has never been done before, it needs to go back to the product unit, and needs to be considered for another three months. Ireland has always had that little bit of a scrappy edge to us as well as well as delivering quality.

Dusty Rhodes 00:28

Hello there. My name is Dusty Rhodes and you're very welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Irish engineers are having a fantastic impact across the globe. But are we nimble and innovative enough to take on the internationals? Could the lack of sustainability credentials put us out of business? And why is engineering so fundamental to Ireland's future? Our guest today is one of the country's most prestigious engineers who works tirelessly to promote Irish enterprise on the international stage and is about to give us some great insight. I'm delighted to be joined today by a fellow of Engineers Ireland and the current Chief Executive Officer of Enterprise Ireland. Leo Clancy, thanks for coming on.

Leo Clancy 01:16

Thanks, Dusty. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dusty Rhodes 01:18

So listen, you're an engineer at heart Leo, and a fellow of Engineers Ireland. Tell us a little bit about your career in engineering.

Leo Clancy 01:26

I came to engineering accidentally, actually, which is interesting, because the only reason I picked it was I wanted to be a Vet. But the Leaving Cert points were never going to get me there. So the next best choice was what my two cousins thought, it was electronic engineering, which I knew nothing about. Buzz went for us and came to love. It really enjoyed us. And it was that discipline of learning about something and problem-solving that I really appreciated about engineering and I think gives you a great grounding. Like I've been a manager effectively now for 20 years in one form or another bus. You never lose that engineering mindset in terms of how you approach problems. So I think a really stands to people.

Dusty Rhodes 02:06

Tell me how did all of this engineering work then lead you to work with Enterprise Ireland?

Leo Clancy 02:12

I was working with Ericsson Optics as an ace. And during the summer of 2000, and Asia, we probably had a family choice to make about where we were going to be. I ended up resigning from my 30-year career. With Ericsson. On the day, Lehman Brothers collapsed into designation, to join a loss-making telecom startup patinas. It turned into one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had, I joined as service delivery director and took on engineering. So effectively in the CTO role as Enos did that job for four and a half years, and it was an amazing project, we grew the business, and we made it profitable. And then the business was in the process of being sold. And I met no boss of mine who said that the Ida was looking for a head of ICT, being this about marketing the servos, helping attract the biggest ICT companies to Ireland's that's UN's a bit more interesting. So joined Ida and spent eight years there leading the tech sector. My clients were Amazon, Intel, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. So that led me to an immensely interesting eight years of seeing that hyper-growth of the tech sector. And then it's always been my ambition to be CEO of a company, private or public. I would have said that we're for a person who's come from industry, there are two super interesting jobs in the public sector ecosystem, the CEO of Ida and the CEO of Enterprise Ireland. So this was the one that came up soonest.

Dusty Rhodes 03:41

And does Enterprise Ireland still have that kind of like problem-solving angle to your life, except on a much bigger national scale?

Leo Clancy 03:48

Every day of the week. We're an organization of over 800 people with a budget of around 400 million euros. We have 40 offices outside Ireland. So it's a big organization. But so involved in the tech ecosystem funding university research, and funding companies, my early stage was an equity investor in nearly 2000 companies, you know, just hugely interesting span 4000 clients across many sectors. So there's something to learn in every hour of every day.

Dusty Rhodes 04:17

I kind of want to chat with you about opportunities abroad for engineering companies and how you would kind of look nationally and internationally at things that engineers are always considering like sustainability and innovation in the future. But first, just to kind of give us a bit of because we all hear about the ITA we all hear about enterprise Ireland but you know we don't pay as much attention to it as maybe you would like us to and apologize here now for that. Can you explain to us what is the IDA and what specifically really is Enterprise Ireland?

Leo Clancy 04:47

The IDA is a sales and marketing machine at its heart, it's focused on bringing foreign direct investment to Ireland's enterprise. Ireland is much more complex, we are focused on Irish companies entirely, and Ida is focused entirely on non-Irish companies. So our portfolio ranges from the very earliest founder who's thinking about starting a business and might want to do an entrepreneurship training course, all the way up to companies like Kerry Group and Icon, clinical trials companies, and others who are very large global leaders in their fields. And every company in between. So we've got over 4000 clients.

Dusty Rhodes 05:25

One of the things that I have seen them, you know, we're looking at various videos and and and articles and reopen and investigating you, Lele essentially, one of the things that you said was that engineering is fundamental to the future of Irish enterprise. What do you mean by that? Why is engineering so key to Irish enterprise?

Leo Clancy 05:43

Engineering is a fundamental building block of any modern economy. You know, and I think this will be increasingly true. So engineers build large parts of our world and engineering has been a huge string for Ireland in terms of how we succeed. So if I look at the industries that are growing fastest in my world, its construction actually is one of our single biggest growing export sectors, companies that have engineered the semiconductor fabs, the farmer plants, and the data centers in Ireland, are now taking what they've learned in Ireland, and they're going global, and all around the world, a huge, huge growth rate in that area. Sustainability Solutions was our fastest-growing job sector last year. And again, depends on good engineers who can include can engineer software solutions, carbon monitoring solutions, put them into insights, and life sciences, reading faster, etc. We have hundreds of innovation, of young life sciences companies that are growing very fast now, I think the scientific community probably wouldn't thank me for not including them, also, in addition to engineers, but I think science and engineering capability is fundamental to the creation of new and defensible IP. If you want to succeed in a very competitive global market, you need products that are unique, defensible in global markets, and give you a competitive edge. And I think Roiland does knowledge economy, we need to re-emphasize the importance that engineering and science at the core of our industrial solutions.

Dusty Rhodes 07:14

You say one of the quickest growing areas of the moment is construction and construction internationally. How does construction work on an international basis,

Leo Clancy 07:24

it worked through a number of strands, the primary ones are people making products, whether it's precast, concrete, or electrical monitoring systems, and lots of products like that, you know, partition walls, that are exporters and go into construction products, say, you know, and they might have got their start with an Amazon in Ireland, or with Intel or with or with Pfizer. And once those, once they've proven them, once companies have proven themselves selling products into those companies, the world is their oyster in terms of global supply chains. The other really fast-growing one is people. So the people who built those projects in Ireland, we had a great announcement from h&m B A a few weeks ago, where they were adding 700 jobs around the world, including 400, and Ireland to serve global electrical and data center projects and their mechanical and electrical contractor their core competencies, the people that they provide project manage and install electrical solutions in very large plants. So are people traveling out on a contract basis to be part of the building project? And people that they will hire locally if there's a pipeline to a business that can keep going locally? And complementing those two soaks? Product and people exports are the two elements.

Dusty Rhodes 08:38

And what is it about, like engineering here in Ireland that makes it so appealing abroad?

Leo Clancy 08:44

I guess it's a done mentality. Yeah, if I saw rose, Irish, Irish companies and people are flexible, we know how to roll with things. Problem-solving is at the core of how we think about things. And when I worked at Ericsson, this was also true, Irish engineers would go to sites, and we'd figure out how to get the job done, we wouldn't stand behind. Well, this has never been done before it needs to go back to the product unit needs to be considered for another three months, Ireland has always had that little bit of a scrappy orange to us. And that shouldn't be confused with low quality because it's not Irish people are good at analyzing the problem, working out what needs to be done working out how to change the process in order to get it done, as well as, as well as delivering quality. So I think we can do the two of those together. There are a lot of countries that are good at getting things done the scrappy way and leave you with a mess. And you know, it's not uniformly culture than any country but that that can be true in certain areas. There are other places where the culture is that you follow a process regardless of the difficulty it causes. Ireland threads in between those two were able to change the process and maintain the quality.

Dusty Rhodes 09:55

There's a thing that we have in Ireland that whenever we travel abroad, we automatically assumed People love us. You travel a lot and it's a lot to do with business and enterprise and everything. That surely is not the reality what are the real thoughts of foreigners when they look back at Ireland?

Leo Clancy 10:12

I think they don't love us they really love us just a word.

Leo Clancy 10:19

It's funny, you know, it is a privileged position to be in, but it's generally true. You know, I have traveled all over the world, myself and Ireland, Ireland's an interesting country. First of all, we have a big Global Diaspora. So we've been distributed around the world, we've had people go out and work in every part of the world, and we've never had a colonial history or passage that would color the perception of us in areas. So we are generally welcome where we are, but then we're also good at getting on with people, you know, Irish people are good at understanding cultures, understanding difference, because we've had that Jasper, we've all known people who've traveled too far corners the world and have to have had to make themselves acceptors. And that's permeated its way back into us. We were a nation of migrants. And we've had to be conscious of other cultures, we've had to, we've depended on the kindness of others, to help us succeed as individuals and to help the nation succeed because we had a population that couldn't have been sustained with we were talking this week about the JFK 60 celebrations. The population of Ireland in the 60s was 2.5 million; the population on the island in 1840, was 8 million I believe. So the amount of people who left Ireland or died from the inability because of the inability to leave the country, I think there is a race memory of this and Irish people that makes us more culturally sensitive.

Dusty Rhodes 11:47

I think you're right, because it's something about, you know, us Irish, we have a serious thing for owning our own home. And I always thought that that goes back to the famine when nobody owns their own home, Jeremy is like, you know, it's not a little protection thing that we have. But that's us Irish. And speaking of your international experience, and working with other countries abroad, have you seen stuff in their cultures that you think we should take on board here in Ireland, I would help us with our engineering.

Leo Clancy 12:16

Interesting. I think we're, we're good when we go to places that are just simulating things that are good. They go to somewhere like Israel, or Netherlands to a lesser degree, you know, the level of directness, that that was in those cultures, is something we could probably benefit from at times, you know, I think sometimes Irish people can be a little bit circumspect. And it is that balance of our niceness and, and getting the job done. But the Irish people are more direct than average. But there are little things like that, that we could probably, we shouldn't probably lose what makes us strong, but we could, we could probably still learn some of that. If you look at a society like Germany, you know, where the focus on and value on engineering is so strong and so pervasive. I think we certainly bring back more of that cultural respect for engineering, actually, and not just saying that because among engineers, our podcast today, I actually think it's true that we need to value engineering more, we could, we could certainly learn more about innovation in the way that the United States does it. You know, we looked at commercial numbers this week in various economic reports and the level of innovation in the EU by companies, I think the stats are over 50% of US companies are investing in innovation in some form or other, but only early 30s of European companies are investing in innovation. And if we go back to the construction example that I mentioned earlier, we have companies who are on top of their game in delivering construction projects, I'd like to see more of those companies actually innovating and creating their own products and services that are not the product of the work of the people on a given project. What are new intellectual property-based things that they understand the market will need, in addition to the people effort that we bring, and we probably don't see enough of that, in our industry in various parts of our industry. Some areas were phenomenal. We have amazing startups and scale-up companies that have defensible IP. But I think if more of our services-oriented companies and people who deliver projects for people could start innovating their own products, that would be really interesting. And I think that's very much a US culture.

Dusty Rhodes 14:28

In many ways you're talking about innovation. Have you any kind of particular example in the back of your mind that you're thinking of about somebody abroad that impressed you with innovation?

Leo Clancy 14:38

I'm just trying to think of companies that are analogous to the example he gave no way I'd nearly look locally to some of the innovation being done from the ground up by startups. So if you think of an example, James and extortionate will probably kill me. I keep mentioning exoskeleton if you've come across them, but they're a company in Carlingford the typical way You do Marine Surveying, as you put a big ship in the water with a crew of 10 plus people and it's diesel-powered and you do the marine surveys and cost a fortune to run, and you do it on customer demand. James and his team at x ocean have developed remote control ship that's about the size of an SUV a little bit bigger. Those largely electrically powered such as diesel engines as well, adult surveys controlled by an operator from potentially their kitchen table in Carlingford, or anywhere else in the world, that these chips can be sent and deployed to do marine surveys around the world. So cost differential is huge. The environmental impact is much lower. You know, those are the kinds of solutions that are super interesting for me. I mean, the other big one Combi lifts Mark McVicker and his team and Monahan, which you probably are aware of, they built an incredible facility for with new innovative lifts, you know, there are 14 products, there's some brilliant innovation going on in Ireland. And I think it's not beyond the possibility for Irish companies in various domains, who are already strong on services and delivering projects just start innovating solutions like that within their businesses.

Dusty Rhodes 16:18

So it's kind of from what I hear what you're saying is kind of services are great, but ideas are better. If your current got to take that then because innovation is brilliant from an engineer, thinking of solving solutions and stuff like that, right? How do you get into that kind of innovation area? Because normally, as an engineer, you're told there's a problem with this, we need to fix it. And you've got to but with innovation, it's kind of you're trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist. So what's in your head? Do you see the thought process that people innovate with?

Leo Clancy 16:51

Yeah, I wouldn't say wouldn't read this. It's not. Most of the best innovation is problems that you understand deeply, that do exist. So if you're, if you're a construction company, and you're going to sites every day, and you see those things are done a certain way. And one of the most traditional industries is construction, for instance. So you're going to the site every day, and you see that there's a niche, you want to scratch, actually working out how to start scratching, that itch is probably the hardest part, you know, how do I? How do I put someone on this? So instead of replicating this problem every time and I'm charging my clients, could I have a better business model, where I'm actually eliminating the inefficiency and charging for this product that eliminates that inefficiency. That's an interesting one, that that's hard to do in any business. That's the Kodak moment, you know, Kodak had the digital famously had the digital camera patents an idea in the 80s. But they couldn't bring themselves to not depend on film. And I think we all as engineers need to be thinking about that Kodak moment for all of our businesses. Where do I see something that's a good business today, that I may need to disrupt myself in initially, in order to make myself stronger for the future.

Dusty Rhodes 18:09

So let me follow that then a little bit, if you are looking at your business, or you see something that is happening over and over again, you come up with a novel and interesting and a new way of tackling that problem and solving that problem. That's what we call innovation. We kind of think, how am I going to turn this from an idea in my brain into reality? Because quite often, it could be something quite big that you need help with. Is it at this stage that you approach Enterprise Ireland, or should you do something else first before we start knocking on your door?

Leo Clancy 18:41

As early as you like, and as early as possible, I would say so if you look as if you look at and I have some examples, my head at all use them because I'm not sure at what stage they're at. We have consultancy companies that have done a number of things they've either come to us for. So one really simple thing we can do. If you have an idea, and you don't have an engineer, if you don't have let's say you're a construction company and you don't have a software person, you can go to a university, we can give you a 5000 Euro voucher to spend with the university to get a prototype built. And that's no cost to you, you own the IEP, you just get the vote for most you get the work done, you guys it's delivered for you. You can go higher than that, once you've done that, you can build that up into an innovation partnership where you can get up to 660 5% of the customer, a much larger project done. And this is before you have to commit any full-time permanent people beyond people who can interact with the university on the idea. If you think you can have people on staff who can do it we can help you with an initial feasibility grant to actually explore that idea in detail and they are very substantial. So you can put a few people on this for a year or two. So that's the scale of where we can help early some companies are juicy where they have a services business. They don't want to distract focus from the core, which is right in many cases, they spin out a company. So they'll create a new entity which we can also get behind As a potential co-founder with equity or other ways, so they're de-risking from the core, but they're also given a better headspace some potential to the people who are in that company, and potentially giving some benefit to the people who go with that idea that they might have returned out of that new business in return for their efforts, folks, there's any amount of ways, but just you, thank you for the question. Because you use that as effectively in your question, come to us, as soon as you have an idea, we really want to see innovation probes, and explored by companies as early as possible.

Dusty Rhodes 20:33

One of the things you think of as a company, because I mean, here we are, we're the home with the international firm, and we're seeing headlines lately, like, you know, those three internationals paid. I can't wait, what was the day that 1/3 of all corporation tax three companies, it's, it's insane. So they're huge. But then you're kind of an engineer listening to this, you kind of think, well, actually, I'm just part of a small little engineering company, maybe we're evolved in technology or something like that. Do you think that small emerging tech companies that Ireland are possibly in better shape than the big multinationals are in a better position to be able to innovate?

Leo Clancy 21:10

I don't think it's as binary as that, actually, I think. But, yes, small companies can pivot their model a lot quicker. You know, that's, that's something that's certainly true. We see it everywhere that by the time you work your way up through the innovation process, and large company, at startup can have delivered a product to the market, you know, and that's just a fact of life, I worked on a very large company, I worked at a very small company, I went from 100,000 person company to a 30 person, company. And to those are nice, and the difference is brilliant. And I think small companies often don't realize that superpower that they have, I think large companies can eventually do whatever they want. We talked about this recently, with Chuck GPT, and GPT. For large language models, large companies own a huge amount of computing power, plus, they will take longer to come to market with solutions, you know, small companies, and we've seen this with open AI can actually move faster, where they will get stuck potentially as on the resource needed to scale up an idea but depends on the domain you're in. If it's large, long language models in AI much harder to scale those up because there's a global scarcity of Nvidia chips at the moment. So you're going to hit a barrier, not to mention the money required. But in most other domains, small companies can move fast, I think it can be a much bigger proportional bet, though. So just understanding what you're getting yourself into planning for is making sure that the financial model behind what you're setting out to do is clear, those are important. And again, that's where we can help. So we have people who can help flesh out. An idea from a technical feasibility point of view can also help you with a financial model, the cash flow analysis, and things like that. So that's where we're keen to help more and more companies.

Dusty Rhodes 22:58

I'm not thinking about all these and you know, kind of the agility of being a smaller company and being able to experiment with ideas. And then there's this port from Enterprise Ireland. And you're thinking about not just doing it in this small little rock on the side of the Atlantic, that there's a market of billions and billions out there. What kind of opportunities, from your point of view are there in the world for Irish engineering companies?

Leo Clancy 23:20

Huge opportunity, where I'm getting asked all the time these days, do global conditions mean that we should be getting ready for attraction in exports? And should we be worried about the prospects for Irish companies and possibly globalization going to do for us? You know, I think I think those questions are useful to continue asking, but they're not relevant to where we're at at the moment. We have a huge market in front of us for Irish companies. And the optimism is huge. We survey our companies every year on their sentiment about the future of the markets. Companies are telling us in the high 80s and early 90s have optimism about growing their international markets this year. That's a survey we did earlier this year. And it's borne out to be true. If you look at the large globalization concerns that are out there and say they are they're relatively narrow, actually, worse, aimless. You know, things like semiconductor chip battles between large countries and other things around minerals generally don't affect Irish companies in a systemic way. There are companies that will be affected by Chip shortages and by material shortages and other things. But we're not systemically dependent on our existence exposed to some of the key geopolitical things that are going on. And I think we're in enough markets actually, that we should be resilient to whatever might come in terms of financial shocks. So I'm really optimistic about the future. There's any amount of business out there to be done. We said saw the signs in 2022, the US grew to $5 billion of exports from Irish companies for the first time. Eurozone exports grew by 28% Okay, Last year, construction actually was the biggest country research that grew by 50% in the eurozone. And that is companies out building data centers where we know that there's a market fueled by including Chuck GPT and other applications that will continue for another 10 years as a healthy market. There are markets in biopharma for vaccines. You know, I'm the markets were in our resilience to what may call them and financial markets.

Dusty Rhodes 25:29

You've mentioned chat GPT a few times. And AI, of course, is on everybody's mind. And where should Irish engineers be thinking, for the future, with everything changing? So, so fast?

Leo Clancy 25:42

It depends on your domain, I would say, digital is, is huge. And I think engineers need to be thinking about digital models for the delivery of their products. Even in highly traditional industries, like construction soaks natively, digital businesses going to grow substantially as well. So like the AI models and areas like that, so digital is huge. And even if you think digital isn't relevant to you, you should be thinking again, because digital can be delivered easily from Ireland to anywhere in the world which is unlike a physical product. So even if you're in the physical product business, you could add about valuable revenue stream through digital. Digital is also incrementally the cost of a new digital product once you built one zero, popes, you just punch another piece of software out it doesn't cost you anything to do. So to Highmark the margin model. Sustainability is the other one. So it's the other big secular trend at the moment. But it's right, I mean, there is going to be a revolution. Regardless of what happens with financial markets, we're going to see continued and vastly increasing investment in sustainability. So that is certainly something that every company should be looking at, as an opportunity, but also as a Thresh. If companies don't have sustainability plans, and verifiable ones for their businesses, they will be out of business in three to five years' time. No one will buy from a company that doesn't have a good ESG plan. And they can't verify their own sustainability credentials, saying it's only a matter of time.

Dusty Rhodes 27:11

When you say verifying your sustainability credentials, what kind of is this literally a certificate on the wall? Or what do you mean by that,

Leo Clancy 27:20

that won't be good enough. So you can't just achieve a certificate and call it done, you've got to be able to, for instance, be in control of your scope, one, two, and three emission levels, you've got to understand your supply chain in terms of where the products came from, what environmental impact they had both on carbon and on even things like labor conditions, sources, the finance that you use to build your business and all the other aspects on environmental social governance, you've got to be able to prove through your supply chain, that you are not negatively impacting your customers. So the large customers of all of our Irish companies will demand that they can show that they're not negatively affecting their own environmental stance, and they will go deep, if they haven't gone deep so far, they will go deep in order terms into your ESG credentials and will want to see evidence that you can start over. So searching on the wall is a nice start, but it's not going to get you there. Unfortunately, we can help with that we have for instance, a climate and sustainability voucher which we can give companies, two days of consulting that gets fully covered, which helps have a first look at how you stand at this. So 1800 euros, just helps you take a good look at yourself. We then have various stages of green transformation programs that we can bring to bear for companies. So you can get green Start Green plus green transform, which helps you actually bring in consultants into your business and work with you through this entire chain, train your people. So that's an offer we have it's undersubscribed, Dusty, at the moment, people aren't coming to us for this money, and it's either it's a high level of support 100% cover to the wall, vote your level 80% At the next level 50% After that, so and we're not seeing the demand. 

Dusty Rhodes 29:06

First, let me ask you because everybody's telling you about sustainability. But I don't think an awful lot of people really understand it. And you're saying that it's under subscribed, why is it under-subscribed?

Leo Clancy 29:15

I think people are people are very busy. And I know that sounds like a terrible excuse. But we've had braces. We've had COVID-19 We've had the Ukraine crisis, we have more breaks of coming with globalization and supply chain shortages and shocks, inflation and pricing, and all those things. So companies like mine have huge empathy and sympathy for SMEs in the middle of all that because most do not have a big superstructure of admin people who can take on loads of extra stuff, they're struggling to survive. So I think there's a real risk that this has been to deprioritize because the time as well as understanding and I think that's where we can help though we can help with some of that light touch consultancy that can come in and help with some of the explanations, but that's why it was so forceful, really in my description of what will happen to people in their markets, if we don't do this, right, because this is an existential threat, you know, the day will come when you receive a tender that you won't be able to respond to that might be fundamental to the future of your business, and the day is coming.

Dusty Rhodes 30:20

It's like having a tax clear insert, if you can't rustle one up for 24 hours, you're dead, they're gonna go away. So you need to have something along the same way with sustainability. So I get what you're saying in that it's a threat. If you don't look after this, well, then that's gonna cause you big problems in the next 235 years. If you do look after it, it's opening up a huge amount of opportunities, but what is the actual impact? When we look at sustainability from an engineering point of view or within an engineering? Business? What impact is that actually having on real-world sustainability?

Leo Clancy 30:58

Yep. So depends. Like generally, for businesses, if you have a sustainability plan that will make you better insurance, how you do your work, nevermind meeting your customer's expectations, it's generally a good thing to do that you would look at the emissions from your business that, you know, generally leads you to efficiency, actually, you know, so if you have this good sustainability plan, it should improve and enhance your business, it shouldn't be a cost, you know, look at all the people who scramble to put solar panels in in the last year, when there were more expensive to procure and to deploy, because the business case became immediately obvious when electricity prices went through the roof. That's, that's what if they had done it sooner, it would have cost them less to do and they would have had an immediate buffer against those electricity bills. It's hard to make the capital argument for them, though, unless thing unless things get very expensive. But I think taking those decisions earlier will help offer you because essentially, sustainability is about reducing your consumption and improving circularity. Those are all things that actually reduce costs as well. Ultimately, in the long term. Now, the InVEST ability of them is a challenge. And government is working on a number of measures around ensuring that there's more loan and scram capital available for businesses to invest in sustainability. So that's good. The other thing though, is, in that marketplace, your customers will want to buy from companies that have high sustainability credentials, and that will increasingly be the case you will do better in your markets as well as being more efficient. And the way to do it, and this is where engineering is crucial. Sustainability depends, particularly for a product company, you know, the design cycle is so important when you when you're an engineer, you sit down with a blank sheet, we don't use drawing boards much anymore. But you know, it's the turn it's drawing board to design a product, rather than just sketching out the most optimal engineering design with, whatever the most efficient products are, you now need to be asking yourself, what efficient way the sustainability credentials of those components are. So you might put a component into your design, that is the most efficient. But if it's made using questionable materials, or questionable labor practices, or if it doesn't have a future sustainability plan itself, using that component is going to compromise you with your customers. In the end, it's also going to compromise your potential in terms of costs, it's not sustainable. So these are really good questions to ask generically, even if, even if they're hard once you get your head or under a yawn. And engineers are vital to this, the design process and ensuring the childhood that you have this thought or so in advance is probably fundamental.

Dusty Rhodes 33:41

I think that's kind of going back to a lot of what you have been saying is that you know, you take a small idea, and a smaller dn or a small chain somewhere like that can grow. And it can grow your business here in Ireland, and it can grow internationally and as good. Can I ask you just kind of about the future because the engineer is a very curious kind of people like to look at the big picture. And you had said that 2022 was it was a record year for Enterprise Ireland, do you think we're going to be able to keep up that momentum over the next three, five years?

Leo Clancy 34:14

What's the cause? I hate making predictions, especially about the future. Yeah, so I suppose just one clarification, I always rushed to clarify, this 2022 was a record year for our clients. We don't have record years our clients do. And you know, we're here to support and serve. So. So I think it's an absolute testament to Irish business this, that we've had that record year and we had a record during 21 as well and exports. So Irish businesses performed so well during the pandemic. I'd be very optimistic about where we're going in the future. I think notwithstanding what may happen in the global markets, I think we're going to continue to see growth in Irish business exports, and growth and jobs.

Dusty Rhodes 34:57

Another big thing that's being talked about at the moment is the impact To 2030. It's the government's Research and Innovation Strategy, how's that being implemented?

Leo Clancy 35:05

I'm not very close to us in terms of the day-by-day implementation, but the ambition is very strong. And we're working very closely with our colleagues and Science Foundation Ireland, in the higher education authority in the universities, where we are a research funder as well, NASA, lots of people know this. Enterprise Ireland has a research and innovation team that is 70 People and has a very large budget, and that we deployed into more industry near pipe research applications than Science Foundation, Ireland. So we are part of that an intrinsic part of agenda respectable out of the things we do so going well, I think there's lots of things that we can continue to do better. But that's true in every research ecosystem in the world. I met colleagues from South Africa yesterday, and we compared notes about the things we like to boast about how we're doing and the things we don't like about how we're doing was, I think Ireland has a wonderful research ecosystem. And I think it's something we can build on. For me the priority is getting more industry more engaged, more industry players more engaged with academic institutions. That's, that's the core, I think we need to go to

Dusty Rhodes 36:14

Al, how would you see that then applying to engineering?

Leo Clancy 36:18

Engineering, many, a huge number of the projects that are done in the research ecosystem are done on behalf of engineering companies on our edge projects themselves. So it's, it's intrinsic to engineering. I think bringing out more university-based IP into how companies do their business is going to be a large part of that. But I think it companies guesses so actually, I was speaking to an engineer yesterday morning, he was in the biotech industry, actually telecommunications, but he was he's an IP leader in a telecoms company. And he had a wonderful experience of having done his PhD, which was partly funded by Enterprise Ireland funding way back in the day, in the early noughties, and was able to take some of that IP and create a spin-out company and, and bring that into an industrial environment and create global products. And that's the path you know, we have wonderful people and intellectual property in our universities, where we need to find increasing ways to unlock that and to follow that journey and to get that IP out into the wild and create value and profit for Irish companies.

Dusty Rhodes 37:23

Finally, just from your own perspective, and kind of looking towards 2030, as, as I just mentioned a good number. It's seven years away, seven years is a good number, isn't it? What vision do you have for this little country?

Leo Clancy 37:40

Ireland Inc, in 2031, of all government has said a white paper for enterprise. And if people haven't read us, I'd encourage them to do so it was published last December. It's government's vision for 2030. Actually, in terms of, in many respects. So we've two or three key things, I'd say. First, I think we are aiming that we will have 50% more large Irish companies by that point than we had last year. So and that's, that's ambition, too many Irish companies fail to a certain point and then are sold to global players are, you know, otherwise, leave our shores, we want to keep more of those companies Irish for longer and grow them to a global scale, they believe that's achievable. And seven years of 50% growth from we counted 104 last year to over 150 is a big jump. But I think the momentum is there if we can get behind such as Enterprise Ireland. The other big target that we have for 2030 is a 35% reduction in carbon emissions in respect to Irish enterprise on data is going to be hugely challenging 35% reduction in the context of a growing economy in particular, it's 35%, from the baseline that we would add early this decade, back down NASA have any growth that we see. So that's a serious ambition. But we have to achieve those as part of the government's plan. So we'll be pushing very hard on that as well, folks, I think more scalars companies and significantly reduced carbon emissions from ocean enterprise are probably the two that are top of mind there's adding a bunch of smaller ones,

Dusty Rhodes 39:16

Leo Clancy, It's a huge pleasure, honor, and brilliant to be able to see your point of view on the world, especially in relation to engineering and the amount of ideas and information and ways of looking at things that you've just given to us in is one podcast is absolutely phenomenal. I can't thank you enough for joining us today.

39:37

Thanks, Dusty. And thanks to the team at Engineers Ireland it's a privilege to be here. Really appreciate the partnership and congratulate you all on the work you're doing.

Dusty Rhodes 39:46

If you'd like to find out more about Leo and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the show notes area on your podcast player right now. And of course, you'll find more information and exclusive advanced episodes of our Engineers Ireland AMPLIFIED podcast on our website at engineersireland.ie. Our podcast today was produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. If you'd like more episodes do click the Follow button on your podcast player to get access to all of our past and the future shows automatically. Until then, from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you for listening.

Discover how digitalisation has been woven into the fabrics of business and society, and how Irish engineers have risen to the challenge.

In episode two we explore how technology continues to redefine sectors of the engineering world and how these strides in digitalisation are increasing speed, accuracy and efficiency in business. 

We are joined by Michael O'Shaughnessy Digital Lead for Construction at PM Group, Ed Arnott Electrical Engineer at MMA Consulting and Darragh Ryan, a Design Manager at Horizon Offsite Ltd

Listen below or on your podcast player!

Topics we discussed include:

• Offsite engineering and its benefits (01.49)
• How digitalisation has changed how we approach project management (04.47)
• The benefits of moving away from manual work to software systems (08.21)
• Trimble and the role it plays in electrical engineering (09.29)
• The biggest challenges of working in a post covid world (16.08)

Guest details:

Michael O Shaughnessy is Digital Lead for Construction at PM Group with responsibility for delivering  PM Groups Strategic Digital Plan for Construction 2025.

Darragh Ryan is a Design Manager at Horizon Offsite Ltd. Darragh’s work focuses on the design and management of light gauge structural steel frame projects across both Ireland and the UK.

Ed Arnott, Ed is an electrical engineer at MMA Consulting. Ed’s background in the industrial gas and petrochemical industries and specialise in hazardous- area electrical design.

Contact details:

Ed Arnott Electrical Engineer at MMA Consulting Engineers
uk.linkedin.com/in/edward-arnott 

Darragh Ryan
www.linkedin.com/in/darraghryan1

Micheal O Shaughnessy
linkedin.com/in/michael-o-shaughnessy-92a5241b

More information

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/

Quotes

The cloud has probably been the biggest transformation. We've got people spread across the world working in the same environment in the same space and they're getting instant updates.

Michael O’Shaughnessy

Offsite construction is a relatively new industry and born out of digitalization. It's something that's becoming more and more possible as digitalization progresses. 
Darragh Ryan

The great advantage of the program I use, Trimble, is that it's actually designed around the regulations. So I know not only the capability of the equipment but I also know what is considered safe and legal. 
Ed Arnott

Transcription text

For your convenience, here is a 90% accurate automated transcript of the podcast.

Dusty Rhodes  0:39 

Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes Welcome to episode two of our digitization and engineering mini series, where experts at the forefront of their engineering fields explore how digitization has been woven into the fabric of business and society and how Irish engineers are rising to the challenge. Today we have a another three amazing guests for you. They are the digital lead for construction at pm group. Michael O'Shaughnessy. Michael is responsible for the delivery of pm group's strategic digital plan for construction. 2025 Darryl Orion is a design manager at Horizon off site whose work focuses on the design and management of light gauge structural steel frame projects across Ireland and the UK. And from m m a consulting we're joined by electrical engineer Ed Arnet. Ed's background is in the industrial gas and petrochemical industries and specializes in hazardous area electrical design. Let me start with Dara. Dara, you're an off site engineer. And I can't think of anyone more perfect to benefit from digitization. How has it shaped your industry over the last 10 to 15 years?

Darragh Ryan  1:49 

Yep. So offsite construction is a relatively new industry. And it is born out of digitalization, really. So it's something that's more and more possible, as digitalization progresses, when you do a building off sites, you need a lot of coordination up front in the design, you can't really figure it out, well, you can, you can figure it out on site, but that slows everything down. And that goes back to the more traditional way of doing things. But also construction you do your your drawings and model and 3d upfront, you coordinate where the m&e where the services are going, where all the steps where they act, tact wants, doors, windows, whatever. So all that is done upfront in advance, and then you manufacture the material before it comes to site. So, you know, without the digitalization, also construction will be, you know, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be where it is today anyway.

Dusty Rhodes  2:47 

And as an electrical engineer, how has digitization shaped your industry,

Ed Arnott  2:53 

I suppose the main impact has been the speed at which you can perform a calculation. Electrical Engineering has always been this sort of iterative process, every time you make a small change, you have to say, increase the size of a cable and maybe increase the size of a fuse, and maybe you change the cable route. And all of these little changes can have a big impact on the design. So having a system where you can calculate and recalculate very quickly is extremely useful. And then of course, there's the means of recording the information and sharing it with other fields. So some programs allow you to do that, and to keep a good record of all the equipment that you plan to use.

Dusty Rhodes  3:35 

And, Michael, I think the title of your job just shows the change that we have seen in some engineering firms, you are the digital lead ad pm construction, is this a sign of the importance that digitization is having at the company?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  3:49 

Absolutely. We have a strategic plan for 2025 led by I suppose a term we call D LPD. digitally enabled lean project delivery, digital being the enabler, lean being the foundation, you know, reducing waste from processes and, and trying to get gain real value for our customers down the line as we deliver projects. So it's somewhere we have to go it's primarily driven by a major skill shortage in the industry demands our true, you know, gone through the roof. Clients want buildings built immediately as the you know, they want to get the products on the market and, you know, we're seeing something just to go back to Gary's point, you know, we're seeing a huge amount of offsite manufacturing, and lean and digital underpins, you know, the speed of how we can now deliver so it's where the industry is going and, and pm grouper are trying to stay ahead of the curve and get there you know, you know, as the front runners you know,

Dusty Rhodes  4:47 

can I ask all of you these changes in digitization has changed the way that you approach a project in the first place? So if somebody says to you, we need x building facility in y place Has that changed how you start with your blank sheet of paper? What do you think? Darren?

Darragh Ryan  5:05 

Yeah, it would, it would like, first of all, the digitalization process allows you to visualize things very, very quickly. So site constraints, you know, that can be easily understood before every year on site, you know what what roadways are near is there's real networks near. So setting up the site and site safety. That's, that's a huge thing. Now that that can be done through digitalization, that couldn't be done previously. Also, what you can do with digitalization is get experts involved, that might necessarily be from that location. For example, you can get experts in from abroad from other parts of the country, you know, that have more experience with the problem at hand. And you can do that through digitalization whether it's, you know, video calls, or you know, remote working, things like that, you know, so. So on that side of things, it leads to more a collaborative working environment where things are safer, you get the experts there, and it leads to just better project delivery.

Dusty Rhodes  6:09 

And, Michael, how has digitization changed the way you approach a project?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  6:14 

Yeah, I think I think that's a really good question. And ultimately, it underpins, you know, the whole digital transformation. So, how we started this journey was we tried to understand what we do. And the key to doing that is identifying our our core processes. So once we defined and were very clear of what our processes were, we looked at where we potentially could strike value by optimizing how we deliver those processes. So what we found was, is in any project lifecycle, the construction side is where potentially the most risk is, it's where more things can go wrong, that's the longest time on site, you've got more people that are moving, you've got a lot of equipment moving in, you know, that's where the real efficiency has to need to start. So we looked at that in real detail. And we, I suppose, identified certain processes. And we felt that if we digitize those processes from, you know, making information better available to collecting data, we could ultimately remove some of the people and waste from from projects. So to do that, what we did was we identified core activities that we would not have typically done at design stage. So we would embed certain information into the models, we would do certain activities at design stage that when the information moved to the construction phase, that information was readily available, information was set up to be utilized efficiently accessed efficiently. But ultimately, we can try to drive back a, you know, an improved quality or an more efficient quality product, you know, when it wants to get to construction stage. So we put a huge amount of effort now up front, when planning out a project because, as I said, the risk is a construction stage. And that's where you have to plan better now to make these gains and drive these efficiencies.

Dusty Rhodes  8:02 

Alright, let's get away from talking about things in general and explore things a little bit more specifically, I'd like to start with Ed on this because Ed, you're very much into the digitization programs side of things, how does using software now differ from the way things used to be done by hand?

Ed Arnott  8:21 

Well, some of the guys I trained with will give you stories from the 70s about plotting on a graph, what a fuse would do and how much energy would go through it. Now, the great advantage of the program that I use at the moment tremble is that it's actually designed around the regulations. So I know not only the capability of the equipment, but I also know what is considered safe and legal. And therefore I can adjust my design accordingly. So for example, things like the tolerances of cables are based around standards that are actually derived from the British and Irish standards.

Dusty Rhodes  9:05 

And because you know what the standards are and you know what the regulations are and you know what is physically capable, then you know that the project is that you're working on so you're able to put all of this together within that software and boom, you can make it all happen much quicker.

Ed Arnott  9:19 

Precisely. So the software already knows that I have to comply with the standards. I just need to tell it what I intend to do and it figures out the best way to get there.

Dusty Rhodes  9:29 

Tell me about the software that you're using it's trembled pro design. Now I take it you don't work for them and you're not paid for them. This is not a sponsored feature or anything like that. Tell me in a sentence what tremble pro design does is it for electrical only or can be adapted elsewhere.

Ed Arnott  9:45 

It is only electrical, it is mostly a low voltage design tool. And explain to me what that is. So if I am designing a low voltage power system, and I want to decide what size of cable to use or what size of fuse I need, I can use this program to calculate those things. I can also simulate an overall power system, how much energy I'll need? What would be the effect? If there was a problem on that system? Where is it likely to fail? That sort of thing?

Dusty Rhodes  10:18 

And is this piece of software that you need to license and install on your network or various machines in your network? Or is it something that operates in the cloud?

Ed Arnott  10:27 

It's an installed piece of software, I understand. And then

Dusty Rhodes  10:31 

how does it update itself? How does it keep itself regulated with the regulations as at work?

Ed Arnott  10:37 

Well, the software developer tremble issues, regular updates, obviously, you need to maintain your license. But yes, each time the regulations are updated, or each time a manufacturer brings a new piece of equipment to the market, then the database is automatically updated with this extra information.

Dusty Rhodes  10:57 

So let me ask you about speed when you sit down and you're doing a project, and you're trying to decide what it is you're going to use and which cables you're going to use, and how long they need to be and all that. How long would that have taken to do on paper?

Ed Arnott  11:09 

Well, there are back of the envelope calculations, you could probably do, but to give an accurate calculation, it might take an hour or so to do a calculation, which might take a matter of minutes now.

Dusty Rhodes  11:22 

So you're literally saving hours on every project.

Ed Arnott  11:26 

Right? But the real benefit is if you need to make a change, because whereas you'd have to start again, from scratch on paper with this system, you simply click a button, see what would happen if the cable route was longer, for example? And you can do so instantaneously?

Dusty Rhodes  11:43 

Does that help you then when you're trying to design and you're trying to explore new ideas? And you say to yourself, What if you're able to make those changes and see what happens?

Ed Arnott  11:52 

It's good for what if scenarios, it's also good if there is say a late change in construction, say if you have to move a substation, or perhaps a different piece of equipment is proposed from what you originally intended, then you can see what the impact would be, and you can accommodate it very quickly.

Dusty Rhodes  12:11 

And do you find that that software also helps you to make better designs?

Ed Arnott  12:15 

I'd like to think it's both better and more efficient. You shouldn't need to build in such big tolerances if you can calculate accurately what to expect. Very good.

Dusty Rhodes  12:26 

Michael, let me move on to you when you are looking back on some of your work with renewable energy. How has digitization shaped some of those processes? Oh, I

Michael O'Shaughnessy  12:37 

suppose when I was working in renewable energy, I worked on a project or the products that we developed, was designed to be remote and actually below sea level. So getting information and data off that product was something that, you know, was a huge challenge, you know, there's a huge amount of research into, you know, what information should we gather? What information would tell us what would enhance the performance of the machine. So what we find now and how that's transferable to the type of sector I'm in at the moment is, we've got teams and teams of people that are spread across the world, from clients to design teams. So you're ultimately gathering similar types of data, and making it available that provides the right information, valuable information to all those that need it, regardless of where they are in the world. So

Dusty Rhodes  13:24 

Dara had referred to collaboration as being an advantage of the digital world, do you find that there is a lot of that collaboration going on?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  13:32 

Probably one of our main innovations or initiatives this year has been to release the what we call the collaboration portal is which ultimately is each project now has its own suppose website for want of a better term. It's got all the specific project information. It's got a shared collaboration space where you know, the entire team work and save all of their information or access their information. But I suppose where the benefits are, is each projects collaboration portal are structured identical. So where we have teams that are, you know, a bit more dynamic, that are moving from project to project, they can go to the very same location, regardless of the project and find that very same piece of information that's relevant to that project. So, you know, collaboration is key. Similarly to that we've, you know, launched an initiative called tiered agility, which is ultimately how we structure and manage our meetings, right down from the daily huddles that designers will have, you know, in relation to what their daily tasks are, right through to coordination between the different teams to the different trade partners that we work with, right through to management and then at leadership and governance level, or we're dealing with clients. So we've a real firm structure on how we want teams to communicate. So that means the people at the top have visibility and can access the core information that would matter to them and matters. to clients when they, you know, and gained and got gathered out efficiently, traditionally to projects would have typically, at the outset sort of set itself up, you know, in its own way, particularly large projects, you know, every project manager may have, historically may have had their own flavor of how they want to structure the project, but probably bringing in the standardization enables digital, and I suppose it enables efficiency. So, as people move around, they're working in a common environment.

Dusty Rhodes  15:28 

So, is this part of the strategic digital plan that you're putting together for PM?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  15:33 

Absolutely, yeah, it's that standardization. And that's key to success here, it would be very difficult to digitize, you know, multiple flavors of the one way of working. So you have, we have to standardize and, you know, if you have a common way of working, you can then enhance that way of working with it with one digital solution. Albeit, you can improve that digital solution over time. But I suppose all of these digital solutions, you know, require investment. So, you know, you need to, you know, invest and get benefitted out and use that investment, and products across multiple projects to gain value from it.

Dusty Rhodes  16:08 

We have a huge heavy hand from COVID, because it just accelerated everything that was digital last terrific. But now, we've been through that. And we've made a lot of advances in collaboration and being able to work across digital platforms, with your own strategic digital plan within PM, what's your biggest challenge over the next six months?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  16:30 

It's good question. Everybody's back to work. And everybody is traveling again. And the demands from the sector are huge, I suppose it's fixing on you know, certain processes, ensuring that we gain that real efficiency, you know, knowing exactly where we want to push our digital take our digital journey. That's the property the big push, but I suppose the demands on the business to accelerate and then the digital team to be able to maintain that speed is going to be the challenge. Dara

Dusty Rhodes  17:00 

offsite construction, that is your area and digitization must have made a huge difference in that. How do you explain to people the advantages of off site versus more traditional on site construction.

Darragh Ryan  17:14 

So off site what it aims to do, right? It's it aims to construct buildings more quickly, more reliably and sustainably, by taking work away from site and using off site construction. Right. So off site isn't just like gauge steel, what I do, there's two main types of it. There's there's two D Systems, and that includes like a steel frame, which is what I'm involved, that would also include timber frame, precast, panels CLT. But there's also 3d offsite systems as well volumetric systems, much modular systems, you know, so horizon where path of an E Text group now, so we mainly focus on residential buildings. So everything from high apartment blocks, concrete floors, to small houses, lightweight floors, student accommodation, hotels, healthcare, when you compare it to traditional construction, which is a more linear approach, first, the foundations get built, then the walls, then each floor and the roof, you know, whereas also construction teams can happen in parallel. And that ties in, you know, the digital process that allow that to happen. But, for example, while the foundations are being built, you can have walls being made in a factory. And then as the floors go up, you can be fitting out your internals. So things things happen in parallel, that speeds up time on site. So we can cut down, you know, a structural frame program for a superstructure of up to say, 50%. With like HCl, compared to traditional construction,

Dusty Rhodes  18:48 

I just want to double check that you're telling me that you can build the building 50% faster?

Darragh Ryan  18:54 

Yeah, true. We just do a structured frame, but we normally allow, like, if we're on a housing scheme, three days per house, that's walls, up floors in roof on watertight structure. Okay, so it's apartment block, I mean, it all vary in size, but you're talking a typical apartment block a week per floor to construct it, you know, so, so you are talking about 50% saving to say some of the more traditional methods, so also, if it's utilized, right, and that pre design stage goes in early, you can have massive savings and get reduced that site time, you can get revenue earlier, you know, from selling your buildings or renting it depends what they're being used for. So it has massive, massive advantages in terms of speed. I guess then another advantage, it will be the sustainability side of things. You know, it tends to be a lot lighter. It's less carbon footprint than say your your heavier, say more concrete based masonry block schemes. So sustainability is all So another general key advantage in it, and I suppose we touched on the other things earlier, but like quality control, it's in a factory environment, it's also leads to safety. You know, so there's a lot of advantages with like H and off site in general, that are coming into mainstream more and more now. And Michael will testify to that. But we saw the opportunity in the market, and you know, that that's why we're here today, really, that there is an opportunity, it has advantages, and it can, you know, deliver housing and buildings, you know, affordable. And quickly.

Dusty Rhodes  20:37 

How about digitization with clients? Because I mean, it's great for ourselves to know the industry, and we know all the parts. But what about trying to get the clients in understanding the design?

Darragh Ryan  20:48 

Yeah, so what we do is we develop a pre construction model is what we call it, we call it a pre con model for short. And we work in the Autodesk Revit environment. So we build a volumetric model, which is basically just shell elements of the walls, because our walls will have a certain thickness, you know, for the system build. So we build the volumetric model and coordinate that with the architect, you know, so the openings are in the right place, the right size, the walls are in the right place, steps in the slab, whatever, and then also bring in the other design team members. So mechanical and electrical is a huge part. So we would model in openings where the services need to be under huge openings. In buildings these days for mechanical ventilation, for example, we would model in them openings haven't pre made in the factory, so that no subsequent work needs to be done on site. And we would use this model as the basis to collaborate with the client and the clients design team, we would issue out the model with drawings. And that would be used as a tool to comment back to us to build this model accurately. We then use that model then to do everything internally becomes our kind of central design. So we use it to do the structural engineering, we export the steel if there's a hot rolled columns and beams in to the steel fabricators for fabrication. And we also then export it to our own in house detailing software to detail the studs. So that pre con model in Revit becomes a central model for all the coordination and all the design and, and then the manufacturing design as well.

Dusty Rhodes  22:31 

Let me ask you all, because there's pros and cons to everything in life. And we've been talking very much about the pros of digitization and wonderful is, what is the one thing that niggles you that is not being looked after? At the moment? I'll start with add on that one.

Ed Arnott  22:48 

Interesting question. I suppose for me, it's probably about sharing information amongst disciplines. So with my design software, I can export the information to Revit, for example, but it's a little bit harder to get information back from Revit if somebody else makes a change, so I have to maybe manually update the model or change the calculation myself.

Dusty Rhodes  23:15 

And why is that? Is it the same software that they're using? Are they using a different software to you?

Ed Arnott  23:21 

It's different software packages, I think part of the problem is that different disciplines require fundamentally different things in their calculation. So in my field, electrical, a lot of what I do is it's nebulous. We don't look at the physical equipment, per se, we look at its capabilities. But we must also be aware that the physical size of our equipment has an impact on other disciplines. So we have to allow space, as Dara was saying for rises and opes. And that sort of thing. And if somebody decides that we have to have root cables through a different route, that means they have to be longer, which means we might have to redesign them, and so on.

Dusty Rhodes  24:04 

And how do you think that that problem can be solved? Well,

Ed Arnott  24:07 

I suppose if they were one overarching program that could do everything will be nice. I sometimes wonder if something like a VR system might help if you could get a virtual design team and actually visualize what you're designing. So if you could meet together and say, This is my system, this is where I think it needs to go, this is how much space I need. And then you could change the virtual models or suit and agree things that way rather than exchanging drawings and then going through another iteration.

Dusty Rhodes  24:40 

Dara, do you think that that idea of virtual reality will work across the various disciplines?

Darragh Ryan  24:45 

Yeah, it could work and raise an interesting point. But I think the key what what Ed is trying to say there and it's very important is how the different software packages talk to each other. And that could be something that's sure Repeat when it should be something that's improved. It isn't great. We have something now and IFC, which is generally a 3d model type that can be imported into most older software packages, but it's still not perfect. And I think discussion between different software companies on how they can work together and import and export compatible formats, that that's, that's clear. I also think one of the big things might be training, there's new software updates every year for all the programs, but there'll be new things on Revit that we won't be able to use, because we're not trained to use them, we don't know about them. So I think there needs to be a more proactive approach in the industry to train people up and keep developing that skill set, you know, so that when the new things become available, we can pick them up straight away and realize their advantages straight away. I think that's something that the industry could do better, maybe have a training group or society. I know there's, you know, obviously, it's stuff it with engineers, Ireland and death, but perhaps a dedicated digital one,

Dusty Rhodes  26:09 

Michael, do you find with different disciplines wanting to work with each other? And then of course, having different pieces of software or even within one discipline, you've got variants of software? How are you getting across this problem with the strategic plan at PM,

Michael O'Shaughnessy  26:25 

we would have multiple tools, like Autodesk is probably a big product that's on the market. But we would also have a hexagon products, which is a competitor. And particularly in the complex projects that we work in. Certain products are preferred in industry for delivering complex pharma lines, for instance, whereas you know, Autodesk is probably the more collaborative suite, we go to great lengths to get coordination and collaboration happening between our disciplines. And I suppose, where information is not fully translatable, we've developed other processes to gather information from the specific tools to ensure that they are available to those who need it. And but it does take it takes a lot of people. And it takes good processes to ensure that that collaboration happens. And it doesn't come cheap, you know. And those processes, I suppose, are continuously improving. We'd have a team of people, part of our digital team working constantly on developing and improving those processes, ensure that we stick with what's going on in the market.

Dusty Rhodes  27:31 

Time is one thing and money is another and I'm quite sure that you find that people are in another area. Do you find that there is a reluctance for people to learn new digital tools?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  27:43 

No, I would think I would think there's a great lot of frustration in industry. And the demands external demands on on individuals, just due to the workload that's out there at the moment is probably tremendous. So people want to do better, and they want to get to work quicker. There's no doubt about that. And, you know, when this new technology comes, people really really do embrace it as what our experience is and you know, always are willing to go that extra go that extra effort to you know, upskill and develop their skills to understand what's now available in the market and how they can make life a little easier for themselves. I suppose.

Dusty Rhodes  28:24 

I'd like to wrap up today by giving each of you a chance to ask each other across questions, because I'm sure when you're listening to what everybody else has been saying that might be stuck in your head that you want to ask each other. Dara, is there anything you'd like to ask add or to ask Michael?

Darragh Ryan  28:38 

Yeah, Ed, obviously, coordination with m&e is a huge part of what we do. And the big thing that we find is there is a detachment between the consultants, the m&e, consultants and the contractors who are doing the work on site. You know, it seems that the consultants don't fully do the spatial design really of where docks need to go and it's more about performance spec. And I'm wondering how could we bring that design process in say mechanical electrical forward so that it could be coordinated at an earlier stage? Would it be worthwhile for clients to get you know, the m&e contractors in earlier as opposed to waiting for, you know, site to to happen, you know, to work alongside the design process.

Ed Arnott  29:29 

I can see some mileage in that I've had one project in particular where a building design was completed. And I was expected to find a way to get the m&e services from the basement to some heat pumps on the roof, with absolutely no service rises in the entire building. So I think you're right, possibly, some early discussions would help. And I suppose this goes back to my idea of virtual reality, the VR that you can talk through these things and maybe shift things around within your Virtual Building before you start drawing up plans.

Darragh Ryan  30:07 

Yeah, that's that's a good point, then for Michael, it seems that digitalization is more industry led, then legislation lead at the moment. And I think that's largely driven by what saves money we will use. So what do you think has been the biggest advancement quite recently in either your strategy or, or in digitalization that you that you can see, I guess,

Michael O'Shaughnessy  30:35 

access to information is probably been, you know, the the cloud really has transformed things. It's not long ago, since you know, every office in the world certainly in Dublin had a huge server room where, you know, you needed to be in the office, you needed to be on the network, to access files, access information, we've got people spread across the world, working in the same environment in the same space, and they're getting instant updates, information is updating in real time from, you know, locations right across so that what the cloud has has changed has just, you know, Ben, probably been the biggest transformation, I suppose. Yeah.

Darragh Ryan  31:17 

And just to add to that, I suppose it also has helped projects. I remember in the past, you know, when there wasn't the proper BIM system, and you know, file sharing system, you could have one set of consultants, whether they're destructure, or architect or whatever, working with revision six, and suddenly, actually, revision 10 is the latest revision. So having a kind of cloud based BIM service for a project as well has eliminated that from what it used to be, you know, so there's one true copy. And that's the latest file.

Dusty Rhodes  31:50 

Can I throw in a question for Ed, because we're talking about the cloud and everything being available everywhere at every time? Ed, you were saying that the software that you use tremble is based on the actual computer and getting updates doesn't happen as quick as you might have in the cloud? Do you have problems like that and keeping you up to speed with working with other people using that same software?

Ed Arnott  32:12 

Well, that's the program, but the files upon which you're working are obviously stored anywhere you like. So those can be on a project server, and often our

Dusty Rhodes  32:23 

Ra. Okay, see, you get around it that way. Edie? Have you got a question for Michael, or a question for Derek,

Ed Arnott  32:30 

I suppose. Probably best to excellent. Michael. With a design project, obviously, we've been discussing a lot about the upfront design and how we can deliver, say, a completed building. When it comes to the finished product. What happens with your, your as built drawings? Is there a way in which digitization can make the handover package better? So all the documentation, for example, for the end user or for the local authority, or whomever?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  33:06 

Tag said? That's a good question. It's certainly something that I spent a lot of time working on in recent times. So it's very fresh, in my mind, absolutely a. So the work we do typically upfront by developing the design, harvesting the data out of the design tools, and we we package that data and information into our portals. When we get to construction stage, we use digital applications to manage the inspection processes. And what we're doing in many cases, we're actually automatically populating some of the inspection forms from the data that's harvest added design. So you're, instead of using the old notepad or the the clipboard, where you're manually type writing in figures and tag numbers of equipment, and for part of the inspection processes, that's now all automated into the into the form. So an inspector will arrive to site, he's got a certain amount of inspections to do and all the forms are partially pre populated. And all they got to do is execute this step. So with that, then the asbestos and the inspection records all form part of the turnover package, because they're in a digital environment. And the models are all in a 3d environment that gets turned over as a combined package and ultimately then populates the operations and maintenance software package that they use for operating the system. The real value in that is is if something fails, or they have a maintenance strategy, they can go back and see who inspected a particular instrument or a particular piece of equipment when it was inspected by who what tests what were the figures and not shoot informed and how and when they might maintain a piece of equipment or roped off, you know, replace piece of equipment or service piece of equipment through the operation of the of the facility that they're working in. So it's just huge advancements in that space. But we probably have a lot more to do.

Dusty Rhodes  35:02 

Michael, I'll wrap up with yourself. Do you have a question for Edie or Dara?

Michael O'Shaughnessy  35:08 

Yeah, I got I'm not sure where to start, but I suppose maybe. Maybe for, for for Dara. Obviously, quality assurance now is a big thing. Certainly in our industry, I suspect it's the same as yours. And I'm a great believer in offsite manufacturing, do you find you have good quality processes or good digital quality processes for your product? Because obviously, when something gets shipped out your facility and lands on site, what's your kind of view on that?

Darragh Ryan  35:40 

Exactly? Yeah. So look, we've we've improved that massively over the last couple of months. But we've we're introduced a digital process here where each panel gets a QR code, and a QR code is stuck onto that panel with a sticker. Every time that panel goes through a different process in the factory, that he is rolling, that's when the QR code is stuck on, then it goes to assembly. And then it goes to add insulation and boarding and things like that, every time it's scanned and more information is imported in. And then eventually, when it comes out the other side of the factory and loaded onto a trailer before it's loaded. It's also scanned. So when you scan that panel, you can see who rolled it, who assembled it, who put the boards on what time what they when it was loaded on the truck when it was delivered to site. So it follows that process through and we know exactly, you know, it ties back to your quality process. But you know, who who did it? And where the responsibility were, if there's any problem, where was the breakdown. And then, you know, like the the processes then that you have talked about filling in the inspection forms. We also have something very similar. It's an app for site inspections, where we can take a photo, and we can drop a pin on the drawing. And it's all on the app. So the photo is at the pin. And there's a small comment, for example, please insert a new screw or something like that, you know, so we've got a full quality process that brings in the digital side of things that really benefits the end user as well because they have a higher quality product. Well,

Dusty Rhodes  37:19 

I think it might be fair to say that you're all very much proponents of digitization, but more collaboration, and more things working together would be helpful. Michael was shocked to see digital lead for construction pm group, Dara Ryan, Design Manager at Horizon off site, and Ed Arnett from MMA consulting. Thank you so much to you all, for joining us today. If you'd like to find out more about what we spoke about on the podcast because you'll find show notes and link details in the description area of your podcast player right now. Our amplified podcast was produced by dustpod.io for engineers journal, you will find advanced episodes on our website at engineers ireland.ie or just press follow on your podcast player to get our next episode automatically altered next time for me just erodes. Thanks for listening

The promise of renewables is exploding globally and engineering entrepreneurs like our guest on this episode of AMPLIFIED are right at the heart of the action!

Recently named an EY International Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, Jamie O’Rourke is sharing his perspective as CEO of Mainline Group, the leading utility solutions provider at the centre of the boom in solar, wind and other burgeoning green technologies. He’s touting the benefits of ongoing professional development, networking organisations and global partnerships to innovate and integrate transformational change.

Learn about Mainline’s latest projects in Ireland as well as exciting ventures based in Sweden, the UK and other countries at the forefront of innovation. Jamie also shares thoughts about the role of project management in large, complicated infrastructure schemes (such as the one Mainline has undertaken at Dublin Airport) as well as the hurdles engineering teams inevitably face in the field.

The work can be challenging and the pace of change swift, but Jamie sees renewables as a huge opportunity for engineers to be part of the solution to environmental sustainability. “If we want to go to the extreme,” he says, “engineers will save the world, one wind turbine at a time!”

Listen below or on your podcast player!

Topics we discussed include:

• The path less travelled: How Jamie’s early experience working in newly post-apartheid South Africa thrust him into positions of responsibility and a steep learning curve.
• Why Mainline identified renewables early on as a sector that offered tremendous upside growth and a positive way to contribute.
• Colourful challenges faced on a massive drainage project in Cork that involved large-scale upgrades to water and sewer infrastructure and engineering solutions to accommodate multiple site challenges.
• Encounters on projects such as an enormous 73-turbine wind farm – the materials, the logistics, weather impacts, design, technical, installation and other specialised expertise required.
• Growth in solar panels, green hydrogen production and other cutting-edge technologies in Ireland,  whose viability and accessibility are growing “by leaps and bounds” here.
• The complex cabling and electrical infrastructure that Mainline has engineered for the North Runway project at Dublin Airport – and other large public efforts.
• Why project management skills, a CDP credential and the constant professional development fostered at Engineers Ireland are critical components of the successful engineer’s tool kit.
• Jamie shares his networking strategy, which starts with looking for ways to bring value to others and a willingness to be vulnerable, reach out and ask for help.

Guest details

As Chief Executive Officer, Jamie has overseen the growth of Mainline into a key industry provider in the renewable energy and engineering sectors. Jamie’s focus is on delivering quality projects that matter, via the safest means, in support of Mainline customers across various geographies. He is also responsible for Business Development and delivery of Mainline’s ambitious growth strategy.

Jamie was appointed CEO in 2020, after nine years as Managing Director. Having started with Mainline in 2002 as Commercial Manager, on the Cork Main Drainage Project, Jamie progressed to National Operations Manager. He previously worked with Pearse Construction, and Bord Gáis, as well as spending four years with Insitu-Pipelines in South Africa as Operations Manager. Jamie holds Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics and Civil Engineering from Trinity College Dublin and is a Member of Engineers Ireland, as well as a Deloitte Best Managed Company CEO, and an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist.

Operating in Ireland, the UK and Scandinavia, Mainline provides a wide range of services from the Design & Build of Sub-stations, to construction of Airside Aviation Infrastructure, to Turn-key Wind & Solar Energy Solutions.

Mainline has a robust corporate management structure, underpinned by ISO 45001, 14001, 9001 and cyber essentials accreditations as well as the Platinum Member Deloitte Best Managed Company status.

Contact details

https://mainline.ie/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-o-rourke-4298301/

More information

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programmes and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/

Transcription Text

For your convenience, here is a 90% accurate automated transcript of the podcast.

Dusty Rhodes  0:02  
Right now on amplified the engineers journal podcast, we meet the CEO of mainline group, Jamie O'Rourke,

Jamie O'Rourke  0:08  
engineers take concepts, and they bring them to reality that can be putting pipelines in the ground connecting up new houses, or at the other end of the scale space travel. That's what engineers do.

Dusty Rhodes  0:41  
Hello, there, my name is Dusty Rhodes and you're welcome to the engineers Ireland podcast where we speak with our community of creative professionals across the country, about how engineers are delivering sustainable solutions for society both now and in the future to come. Today, we're chatting with the CEO of mainline group who have had huge success in the design and build of substations, aviation, infrastructure and renewable energy among many, many other projects. Before joining mainline, our guest has worked everywhere from Pierce construction and board Ghosh to institchu. Pa pipelines in South Africa and is currently an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalists. It is a pleasure to welcome the CEO of mainline group, Jamie O'Rourke. How are you?

Jamie O'Rourke  1:24  
I'm great dusty. Great to be here. Thank you.

Dusty Rhodes  1:27  
It's always great to hear about somebody's career abroad. How did you end up in South Africa?

Jamie O'Rourke  1:34  
Yeah, back back in the late 90s. After graduating from college, I worked with Pierce contracting for a couple of years, I suppose the opportunity deechi feet, like a lot of people after a year or two, maybe out of college or some people go direct from college after graduating as a civil engineer and Trinity in 95. Seems like a long time ago. Now, as I said, it did a year and a half, nearly two years with peers. And then it was couple of my friends heading to Australia and another friend of mine had got a job offer in South Africa. And we decided to go for the path less traveled. And then when I went, got a job within secure pipelines, pretty much straightaway small Irish expat community down there. I was there for nearly four years had a great time. It was it was an eye opening experience, to put it mildly, South African, the late 90s, just coming out of apartheid, and all of that kind of stuff. So it was a very exciting place to be and you've got in that kind of an environment, you've got responsibility trust upon you. You know, I was relatively young. And early in my career. And I learned a huge amount. One of my first mentors, I suppose, throughout my career place was was the CEO down there of in situ pipelines. And I ended up managing a lot of the commercial and contractual operational aspects of the business for him and got a got a great and broad experience.

Dusty Rhodes  2:50  
So what was the project that you're working on? What was the actual work? It was

Jamie O'Rourke  2:54  
there was varying projects, many of them involved bringing water and sewerage infrastructure to allow the new townships that were being built, as part of you know, I suppose the investment into many areas that had been deprived of investment for for many years prior to that. So it was very much infrastructural, your pipeline, infrastructure, water and sewer, obviously, to have the basic, I suppose human needs to have those kinds of facilities. And yeah, I met a lot of interesting people and had a had a great time learnt a lot down there. And I suppose it came to a point in in late kind of 99 and into 2000, where I had an opportunity to stay under long term or, you know, maybe come back home and the drive home kind of pulled me back a bit and ended up in court working with Borg, gosh, initially, love that had a great time there, great organization. And ultimately, then it got an opportunity to go back into the contracting side of it probably, which is kind of more the side of of construction, that I'm probably more comfortable and more natural. In 2000. I moved to cork and I've been here since then I started working very, very shortly after board, gosh, in 2002, started working with a company called Morrison. And ultimately, that company is now mainline after we affected a management buyout in 2011.

Dusty Rhodes  4:12  
So listen, tell me about mainline engineering them. Yeah. So

Jamie O'Rourke  4:15  
we established in 1999. Originally, before I got involved, a company was set up and worked primarily in the telecoms industry and grew into the UK. Very shortly after that, it was bought out by by Morris and the company I mentioned earlier, and I got involved in the commercial side on on a number of projects, mostly on the water side, but they branched into the water side of the business and we were working on the current main drainage project back in the kind of 2002 to 2006 timeline and ultimately we retained that water and I suppose expertise and the telecom expertise and then we've also branched subsequently into the electrical side the MV HV medium voltage, high voltage side of electrical infrastructure that happened in 2015 when we bought a small power business. At the time, obviously, renewables was gathering momentum. And it's an area we wanted to get into. So we identified that as an opportunity many years ago. And we worked hard at this. And we've built ourselves up now to be one of the main players in that MV HV space in Ireland. And indeed, we've had some international success as well.

Dusty Rhodes  5:20  
So just to give us an indication of the size of the company, roughly, what's the turnover and how many people are working for you?

Jamie O'Rourke  5:25  
Yes, we'd have a turnover in excess of about 30 million per annum, and direct staff of inaccessible 100 100 people. And then you'd have subcontractors and indirect people employed as well.

Dusty Rhodes  5:37  
When you first started working with mainline one of your first big jobs was the cork main drainage project, the one from 2002. What are your own memories of that job?

Jamie O'Rourke  5:47  
That was a very challenging job. Because you've got a very high tide level water level, it's naturally high in Cork. And this was in the the island element of cork, if you're familiar with the geography of Cork city. So the river splits and creates a little island in the middle. And we we were doing one half of that island and putting all of the again similar to my time in South Africa, we were putting upgrading the water and sewer infrastructure because prior to that, a lot of the sewer, which I believe it went straight into the river. So there was a major investment infrastructurally to put in large pipes that intercepted all of those kind of flows into the river and took them off down to little island to a new treatment plant aspect we were doing was pretty much gathering it from the houses intercepting it and then feeding it into those those big outfile sewers. You know, to give you an example, one of the challenging elements of that was we had to go down over Plunkett Street, which again, if you're familiar with it is a fairly narrow street in Cork busy pedestrian street, three and four storey high buildings, eight to 10 meters apart, and we had to put in a six meter deep pipe and you know, originally there was a plan to open quarters and we had some issues, the structures in that part of the car, the buildings are very old. Some of them are you know, less structurally sound and others. So you had all of those kinds of challenges and to manage so we ultimately engineered a solution, you know, where we what we call directionally drilled a large diameter two foot diameter 600 mil diameter pipe, and we drilled sank shafts intermittently along the along Oliver Plunkett Street and drilled from shaft to shaft. So, we didn't have to excavate that had the benefit of reducing I suppose the disturbances to you know, the level of disruption to the local business, etc. So that's one example. Another one was the original, an old outfall sewers, which are going back to Victorian times, you know, we had to uncover those and access them and and there's complications around that from breathing apparatus and everything else health and safety aspects. And then we had to go in and kind of repair those old, very old Victorian old fall sores as well. Some aspects of that that was on the Grand Parade again, a much wider street, but a very busy street at the same time. So they're kind of some of the some of the memories I have another one was we thank you shaft, it's all coming back to me now. We thank you shaft again from Microtonic on Washington Street, and we uncovered some remains of Viking infrastructure, housing or whatever. I forget the particulars. Now, it seems like no, I know the detail a bit better to stage but we have to let the archaeologists in for for several weeks to do their thing. It's all coming back. I'm gonna ask that question in a while.

Dusty Rhodes  8:27  
Nowadays, of course, mainline is growing in the UK, as you said, it went in fairly quick and more recently into the Swedish market. What Why Sweden,

Jamie O'Rourke  8:37  
I suppose, you know, a lot a lot of companies when they when they go international, they follow clients, people they've you know, and businesses, they've got relationships with, it's all about relationships, we had an opportunity to price a large project in Sweden with a with an existing client. We did that. And I suppose we got in early, we looked at all of the different options, we tried to value engineer the solution as part of their wider project scope. How could we integrate what we were delivering with other parts of the project they had to they had to deliver an example would be around the roads, were being built by the civils contractor, and we then have to excavate a trench and lay our cable we had up to 90 kilometers of electrical cable to install adjacent to the road, you need special, specific quality of backfill material. And if we could, you know if that material was processed as part of the road construction, it would reduce the cost for us as an example in delivery of our project. And so we looked at the doors kind of aspects, and you know, how we could work together with the client to deliver the most economically advantageous solution quite often and it's very much part of our strategies and organization. We try to sit down with the clients as early as possible, understand the big picture and where we can bring value and maybe make savings if if x y and Zed are done, you know out in advance of our works as an example. So yeah, so we got the opportunity And we talked about we delivered a 73, turbine wind farm. And the electrical aspect of it now I should say, the geographical area, just to give you a sense of it was was nearly the size, a county load, that the logistics of getting around and moving material around and getting huge volumes of cable to the right parts of site and all of that kind of stuff. And then you throw in the added complication of you know, potentially waking up in the morning, and there's two meters of snow in front of you, you know, so you have all of those things, and we're very good local partner as well, you know, with that kind of local weather knowledge and know how, because a lot of the civil aspect of our, you know, the digging of the trench, we got a local partner on board to deliver that element for us. And then we brought the design and the technical and installation of the cable expertise. So yeah, it's all about getting the right people around the table and getting the right partners in delivering a project.

Dusty Rhodes  10:47  
There's a lot of talk in Ireland about wind energy, is it the same in Sweden? Are they are they even more into it? There?

Jamie O'Rourke  10:54  
They are, is the simple answer. I suppose there's huge focus now internationally on on renewable energy generation, I suppose the momentum that was gathering prior to the war in Ukraine, and I suppose if there is one silver lining to that cloud, is that it is increased focus on renewable renewables and renewable generation to obviously reduce our dependence on gas and simple farms. I was looking at a report there yesterday and 40% of our electricity production in recent years was was reliant on gas. Clearly, we've got an exposure there, we all know. So yes, Sweden is hugely focused on renewables, again, no different to Ireland, they're very focused on the, the offshore opportunities there as well. And in northern Sweden, where we work, they've got huge areas of land with a strong electrical infrastructure. And by that, I mean, the electrical infrastructure that is required to take the power that is generated in a wind farm and bring it into the national and international grid. Because a lot of the time where the wind is or where the power is generated, and where the wind is blowing isn't where it has the greatest need no different to Ireland, the wind blows more on the West Coast, and it doesn't east coast. But power is needed more so on the east coast. So you have to have that electrical infrastructure to transfer the energy around the country. And Sweden has that they've got a very good electrical infrastructure Ireland has, you know, we've a lot of work to do on that. And, you know, it's it's in hand, but plenty more still to be done on that.

Dusty Rhodes  12:23  
What is it that you've seen, the Swedes do that we could learn here in Ireland,

Jamie O'Rourke  12:27  
I suppose one of the one of the main challenges that a lot of people talk about in Ireland is the timeline it takes to get a project from concept to completion. And a lot of that is around the planning process on the offshore side does talk about, you know, the foreshore license aspects, etc. And that needs to be streamlined in Sweden, it is more streamlined. Now. They also have some other challenges. And they're actively looking at some challenges in that regard. And they're actively looking to address those. They've got their neighbors next door in Norway, who are probably, you know, one of the most advanced in the renewables space, I suppose. And, you know, they see the benefit. It's in very high in the public persona, shall we say,

Dusty Rhodes  13:10  
when it comes to renewable energy, wind is the one that we hear about the most. But what are the other areas of sustainable energy that are available and the perhaps we should consider

Jamie O'Rourke  13:21  
solar is a big one, Ireland has only just recently, I suppose, put the support mechanism in place to incentivize the construction of solar farms on an industrial scale, raise one auction and raise to auction results that have happened. Just to explain that raise is the Renewable Energy Support Scheme. It's the program basically, of supports that the government have in place for both wind and solar, because they still need to be subsidized to an extent by by doing that, by subsidizing those, you know, solar projects and wind projects, they become ultimately self sufficient, because you bring the expertise when the expertise are local, and they're there and the market is significant in volume and size and scale, price of materials and everything come down. And you ultimately get to a point, which is coming very quickly. Now, given the cost of electricity is a result of external forces that we spoke about earlier. You know, you get to that balancing point where they will need to be subsidized. But initially, all of these developing technologies need to be subsidized to make them commercially viable. And it's no different to the offshore side of it as well, because there's huge investments involved but the benefits once they're up and running, and the markets mature, in order just enormous. One of

Dusty Rhodes  14:33  
the things about engineering is seeing a challenge and coming up with a solution overcoming it and making it a reality. I hear the word solar power, and I hear the words Ireland and I think that's got to be a challenge.

Jamie O'Rourke  14:48  
Well, I suppose the panels are getting very technically advanced. So nowadays, they even have a double sided panels to pick up the light on the underside, would you believe so? You've done aspects to I suppose consider And if you look at the southern part of Ireland, we get about 1000 sun hours per annum, which is very similar to large parts of Europe, you know, solar, the solar in Scotland. Estonia is one of the international markets we're looking at. It's in its early stages, and they've been through their first kind of auction to support solar. You know, you think of Estonia, you don't necessarily think solar eyler either sorry. But the technology and I suppose the ability of the panels to generate electricity is it's coming on in leaps and bounds. So yeah, it's it's very much a viable option in the Irish market. Other ones, you asked me what other areas that there are, one of the big issues with renewables is the fact that you know, when the wind blows, you create electricity when it doesn't blow, you know, there's no electricity being generated. And and sometimes that is surplus to requirements and doesn't get used. Green hydrogen is an area where, you know, engineering can play a huge part in has, if we can harness that excess wind, when it's blowing, use it to create hydrogen that can then be stored and used to generate electricity. When the wind isn't blowing, you've got your 24 hour cycle of electricity generation covered us. Where does engineering fit into all of this, you know, we're saving the world, one wind turbine at a time or one solar panel at a time. So, you know, you can put that kind of extent of spin on it, because climate change is a huge issue. And, you know, Ireland has a target of generating 80% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. You know, we've a good way to go to get there, we can do it. You know, the t shirt said recently, that wind could be our oil, you know, if we can harness the wind off the west coast here, I'm sitting here on the west coast as I talk to you, and it's blowing hard in the middle of middle of July. So there's huge opportunity out there and engineers will be part of that solution. And, you know, if we want to go to the extreme engineers will, will save the world one one wind turbine at a time.

Dusty Rhodes  16:59  
Moving away from renewable energy, one of main lines of recent projects was the new North runway at Dublin Airport. Now, a lot of people may be familiar in this business with road or motorway construction runways kind of different. What What have you discovered in this project?

Jamie O'Rourke  17:16  
Yeah, well, I suppose we've we've worked over many years with the DA. And we've done a lot of projects in Dublin, cork, and Shannon airports, we deal primarily in the electrical infrastructure, the runway lights, the taxiway signage, the navigation aids, that helped the planes land, all of that kind of stuff. The particular scope that we delivered on the north runway was into the main contractor who constructed the runway and a lot of the infrastructure, the docks, etc, we would pull the cables in, and we delivered to substations as well to power all of that infrastructure. So it's very different to a road in this road has very, as no electrical infrastructure, better street lights, or whatever. So the electrical infrastructure here is obviously the critical aspects of the overall project from a safety perspective, and the navigation aids that go with that to help the planes land, you know, and approach the runway, at the correct altitude, etc, hugely different to erode,

Dusty Rhodes  18:14  
to give us an idea of the scale of it. And also, the concentration of runway may be three, three kilometers long, 3000 meters

Jamie O'Rourke  18:24  
3.3 3.3. And in the case of the North runway, I think there would have been over 2000 runway lights as an example. You know, you've got communications, as well as the electrical infrastructure, you've got the fiber communication infrastructure, as well, we had hundreds of kilometers of electric cable and fiber, you've got the primary cable, which is the higher voltage stuff, you've got the secondary cable, which is the lower voltage stuff, you know, going from each individual light back to the primary cable source, I'm getting into the technical aspects a little bit, which I should never do, because I'm a civil engineer, and I'm not an electrical engineer, so I could put my foot in it literally, but, you know, huge volumes of cabling infrastructure to connect everything up. And you're obviously in a runway as well, you have to have significant levels of redundancy for light bulb goes off, can't take them all out clearly. You know, that's that's a fairly basic example. But you get the point, as

Dusty Rhodes  19:18  
well as the scale of it in such a small area while you're doing it. Number one is you're working in a very highly secure area and then number two, there must be a billion factors outside of your control, how do you manage as an engineer with such a fluid situation?

Jamie O'Rourke  19:36  
Yeah, very good question. And the project management aspect of engineering is a very important part of delivering any project. And if you have a clear, sufficiently detailed program resource to properly detailing the interfaces that you have with other contractors, they have to hand over times from you know, the dissection of the runway is going to be built and and finished and it can be handed over to mainline at a particular point in time. You know, program management is very much a critical part of minimizing the the margin for error issue on a project. When programs aren't managed properly, then you've got, then you've got big problems. You know, it's very much the program management aspect of it.

Dusty Rhodes  20:21  
Now away from a particular project, one of the things we talk about on the podcast is CPD accredited employer with engineers, Ireland, how important do you feel CPD is to an engineers career?

Jamie O'Rourke  20:32  
Well, I mean, I'll go a bit more general, we should all be looking to improve. We were saying in mainline, what got us here won't get us there, in the sense that, you know, we're learning every day, and we can't keep doing the same thing. You've we've all got to evolve and engineers, no different. You know, we've a program and the engineers, Ireland, when we were delighted to be part of it, it's very important that the people continuously strive. And it's an important part of our strategies and organization. So all of our people, it's something we look for and identify in our people, they've got to want to improve, our environments are changing all the time, we've all got to improve, we've all got to continuously look to improve the framework that we have with engineers, Ireland, it's engineer specific, it brings, I suppose, a lot of the moving parts of, you know, engineering, project management, all of that kind of stuff together, very much focused on project delivery. You know, so we find it very beneficial for for mainline Yeah.

Dusty Rhodes  21:28  
Now it's one thing you sitting at the top of mainline Canada, our people this and our people that everybody should learn. What about you, yourself, what's one of the most useful things that you have gotten from being an engineers, Ireland,

Jamie O'Rourke  21:41  
for me, there are very few problems in this world that somebody hasn't solved already, or had to face and you know, has, has thought about all of the options. And throughout my career, the benefit of networking, I can't, you know, overemphasize it enough. And you know, the, the network within engineers, Ireland, you can pick up the phone, and people are always willing to help I find, you know, and somebody has been there and done it. And that's the important thing to remember, you're not you're never, you're never facing it alone. And the strength of the network, and the level of advice and expertise within that network is invaluable. And then this comes down to the very basic, you know, mental health issues, or any of those kinds of things, it all comes down to that level, I'm not just talking about engineering issues. There's always somebody out there who's, who's who's been through what you're going through. And there's a solution out there. And it's very important to remember that,

Dusty Rhodes  22:33  
let me get your view on networking, because networking puzzled me for such a long time. And you may not believe this, but I'm a kind of a shy person. I mean, I picked radio as a career for a reason, because I'm sitting in a room on my own speaking to imaginary people, most of it, so it's perfect. But when it comes to, you know, kind of having to go into a room with there's lots of people that I don't know, or at a conference or something like that, I literally can I hate it. Alright. But I discovered for me, and this is my definition of networking is it's not who you know, it's who you've met. And it's simple as I was up this thing, and that fella was there. And I went up, and I said, Hello, Patti. How are you doing? Yeah, Graham, I am You are lovely to see it goodbye. And it could literally be as short as four minutes. But somewhere in the future, when you need to interact with that person, then you can say I met you briefly at such and such. That's what networking is to me. How would you describe it, for sure.

Jamie O'Rourke  23:30  
You walk into a room and you don't know anybody there. And if you know one person, quite often you tend to gravitate to that person, and you've got to be disciplined and go, alright, I'll talk to three people before I get to that person and the benefit, you never know the benefit of networking, at the point in time that you're doing it, it will become apparent down the road. Similarly, if you go into any those kinds of opportunities are networking opportunities with the mindset of what can I do to help others in the first instance? Right? And, you know, they might have a problem that I can I can solve, or I can, I know the man you can talk to? And you might you might put two other people together? Because if you if you go in with the opposite attitude of what am I going to get out of this, you'll get less. So for me that mindset, and if you win with that people open up and also it's about genuine interaction. You know, if you're, if you've got a problem, and you say, look, I've got a problem. Do you know anybody who could help me people are willing to help. You know, sometimes you put people up on a pedestal and you think that might be too busy or to this or to that people will make the time to help and they just need to be asked a lot of time Never be afraid to ask anybody for help and show a vulnerability. You know, that's genuine and if you're if you're genuine, you know, networking will just happen naturally for you.

Dusty Rhodes  24:43  
That is a superb piece of advice to go in to see how can I help other people that amazing because it just it's like the universe just it just pays you off for doing that. Speaking of professional development, we're recording this before. The EY Entrepreneur of the Year is announced in November but you are final list, I think, what a brilliant way of developing your career and to get into this, do you think the whole process of this award is adding to your own professional development?

Jamie O'Rourke  25:11  
Yes, is the short answer. And I'll tell you why. And it's, it's interesting. You've asked this question after the networking question, I've been at a couple of the events, and the power of that network is, its immense. And one aspect of the program is, you go away for a week on the EY entrepreneur retreat, and you're in an environment with the other 24 finalists, 25 finalists this year, you're in that environment, but you also have many of the past up to up to 100 of the past finalists, you know, collectively, when you put that room together, you know, most problems have been experienced. So if you have a problem, and you're looking for, you know, the solution, it's there, it's in the room, and then the process that you that you go through, and, you know, there's a there's an interview process with the judges and everything else. And, you know, these are highly experienced people, very successful people. And, you know, they're asking questions, they're looking at your business. And then there's other aspects of the dy support as well around strategy development of your business. So it's very much a two way street. And the benefits are, you know, they're significant.

Dusty Rhodes  26:18  
Let me ask you, on a scale of one to 10, how much is this process pushing you

Jamie O'Rourke  26:24  
on a scale of one to 10? How much is it pushing me, it's pushing me outside of my comfort zone, you know, which is always good. You know, I wouldn't necessarily be up in front of the microphone too often, you know, doing this kind of stuff. And there'll be, you know, there'll be a television aspect to the finals, and all of that kind of stuff, which again, I wouldn't necessarily be overly familiar with. And then, you know, like I said, I've got to sit down in front of a panel of very successful, very experienced judges. And, you know, I'll be grilled about our business, and our strategy and everything else. So it's right up there in the, you know, the the eight or nine anyway,

Dusty Rhodes  27:01  
finally, Jamie, tell me what's in your head at the moment for the future for yourself and for mainland.

Jamie O'Rourke  27:07  
I mentioned earlier, you know, we're currently at about 20 million turnover, we want to grow the business to in excess of 100 million turnover in the in the medium term. And I mean, three to five years in the, in the medium term, we've got a lot of the blocks in place for that. We've got a very good team. And we've got a very strong senior management team. So from a strategy perspective, and I suppose a numbers perspective, that's where we want to go, renewables is a huge part of that focus. And solar now is very much taking off in the Irish market. Wind has always been there, and is now again, very much part of our focus offshore is coming online, late 23, maybe into 2024. So therefore, the route, the timeline would very much I suppose we're engaged with the players who are delivering those clients or delivering those projects. So you don't start at an early stage. You've got other projects around the grid strengthening ESB are a very important client of ours. And the strengthening of the infrastructure within Ireland to be able to deliver and transport that power around the country is a huge part of the huge piece of the jigsaw to us, hitting our 2030 target of 80%. You know, renewably generated power. There are projects as well that fit into that grid strengthening mix around the interconnection of Ireland to the UK, with the green link, which is a power a power cable, going from Wexford to Wales. You've got the Celtic interconnector that's coming in from France and hitting the cork Waterford border, there's a huge drive and focus on renewables and grid strengthening. And we see that very much as part of our growth strategy. We'd like to think we're very well positioned to deliver it.

Dusty Rhodes  28:52  
Well, I wish you the very best of luck with all of that. And I'd like to thank you today for giving me being so insightful and open as well with us. Jamie O'Rourke, thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Jamie O'Rourke  29:04  
Thank you very much dusty, it was a pleasure.

Dusty Rhodes  29:06  
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