Meet the man behind the Norfolk Offshore Wind Zone

“I’ve never had a career plan, and I’ve surprised myself that I have ended up here,” said Rob Anderson, project director for Vattenfall’s Norfolk Offshore Wind Zone, reflecting on an international career route that led to him heading the 160-strong team behind the game-changing project to deliver green electricity to nearly four million UK homes.

As work started on the development that has posed the biggest challenges of his career, he marked the 25th anniversary of his graduation from Canada’s military university, when he broke a long family tradition by looking outside the armed services to shape his future.

Veering from the well-trodden military path followed by generations of his family, Rob headed to the UK after his engineering degree in 1997 to continue his academic life at London’s world-leading Imperial College, launching a quarter of a century travelling the world in the energy industry.

On paper, his route appears as engineered as the pinpoint accurate planning of the Norfolk Vanguard and Norfolk Boreas projects. Now, aged 47, he has soaked up a wealth of experience across different energy spheres, largely working in small teams where he has built a wide breadth of expertise, practice and perspectives across projects.

“I use the expression ‘Jack of all trades, master of none,’” he joked. “My career has been more progression than plan, started off in my thermal background.

“When Vattenfall’s recruiter told me about this opportunity as project director of Norfolk Vanguard and Norfolk Boreas, it was a big step up. It is a huge project. I was stepping into a big company. I was excited but also aware that this was a big change for me. I went from a company where there was five people doing development to a company of 20,000.”

Successful navigation of a tough recruitment process that put him “through the wringer” gave him a brief taste of what was to come.

The twists, turns and challenges the Norfolk cluster has faced made that “big step up” even steeper.

“There are not many projects as big or as complex as what we have taken on,” he said. “This project was always going to be complex in the way we are using HVDC technology and integrating that into a single cable corridor. This is unique and where the rest of the industry needs to go, and we have been pushing that through.

“Add the challenges and delays we have faced during the planning process, leading to having to change the planned sequence from constructing Vanguard first, followed by Boreas, to now Boreas first, negotiations with the stakeholders, consents, the uncertainty of Brexit, Coronavirus, the Ukraine war and then the supplier market situation and the supply chain plan elements we need to deliver, there has been a lot of conflicting aspects we have needed to find the right way through.

“There are a lot of new aspects of this project. Add on top the scale and the complex environment we are dealing with, that’s a lot of complexity we are dealing with at once.

“We have had to get through all of that. We are here now with Norfolk Boreas awarded Contracts for Difference (CfD) and moving towards construction with Norfolk Vanguard to go into the CfD round next year.

“We have the first phase of the project under construction and more ready to go. Kicking off construction alongside preparing for another bid is particularly challenging, especially in this environment.”

On top of the project curveballs, the first lockdown was announced just days after Rob started his job in March 2020, meaning he spent the first year in his flat in Brighton working with colleagues he’d never met.

More than 20 years’ experience in small teams “touching every aspect of projects to gain a unique perspective”, along with his passion for project management and fitting multiple pieces together, turned out to be ideal foundations for the unforeseen challenges ahead.

“I had a wide exposure in the early part of my career to every part of project development – the financing, engineering, commissioning and testing. In most of my companies I had to have a wide range of responsibilities and areas of interest and certainly hadn’t spent a lot of time focusing on one aspect in a lot of detail because of the small size of the companies.

“I’ve had to be flexible and learn a little bit about everything to get to where I was.”

The adaptability and support of the dynamic, highly-skilled team has kept the project on track, according to Rob.
A core team of about 10 is supported by 160 more around the UK, in Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands and Germany. The team is now building fast as the project moves into the construction phase.

“We are a very international team –even in the UK we are spread out all over the place,” he said. “In some ways lockdown made it easy because everyone was on Teams every day, and days were full of screen meetings. Now we are getting people together and realising the value of that, but at the same time, there are the travel times and inefficiencies of doing that.”

The team’s passion for the project and maintaining focus and drive in the face of challenge and change is second to none, he added.

“What I have appreciated at Vattenfall is the depth of knowledge and expertise. Previously, I was a sort of one-man band having to pretend I was an expert, but now I have a team who are the experts and that has been a big difference to me. I have a team to rely on and trust because they have the expertise to overcome these challenges. This motivates me.

“My core team are friends now, and we drive this incredible project forward together.”

Corporate support is also strong, he said. “As a company, Vattenfall stands behind what it says. It really wants to be the engine behind the transition to a fossil-free future, and the Norfolk Offshore Wind Zone is the flagship project that allows it to do it. The support I get, and the project gets, and the way the company can adapt to understand the challenges and continue to support through all of those is very positive.”

Rob embraces the project’s complexity as exciting more than daunting.

“I have always liked how the pieces fit together to make a project and the balance of compromise you need to do to make sure everything works together. The technology is fantastic, but it all must fit together with the other parts – the communications, landowners, stakeholder engagements, and how you deal with different parties. That has always been fascinating to me.”

The effects of world events and colliding crises on the project is what keeps Rob awake at night.

“It is not an easy environment right now. We have an energy crisis, and we had to put together a very competitive bid for Norfolk Boreas in the CfD round. There is still a lot to do across the piece, whether it is compliance with our consent requirements, supply chain challenges and how we adapt to that, and the global financial aspects of it all. That is keeping me busy and awake at night.

“We also must keep an eye on our people through all this – make sure they are happy and motivated and we are not putting too much pressure on them. This is really important.”

Rising costs of materials is the biggest current financial challenge, he said.

“It is putting a lot of pressure on suppliers and on us, particularly now that we have bid and have a fixed price. It is squeezing everyone. Hopefully things are improving but there has been so much volatility in the market we have to watch this carefully.”

As the project transitions into construction, Rob is looking forward to his role changing, major contracts being signed, “thousands of people working on the 60km cable corridor” from landfall at Happisburgh to the onshore substation site at Necton, and Vattenfall moving towards its Final Investment Decision.

All this will be alongside preparing the rest of the zone and going through CfD for Norfolk Vanguard.

Despite this task list, Rob finds time to unwind by paragliding.

“If I get too stressed out, I tell my team that I am going to jump off a cliff.”

He recently took part in his first paragliding race in the Alps and finished in the top third.

“Flying in the race with another 120 pilots wingtip to wingtip, racing in massive mountains, was incredible. It is a challenge and is good for an engineer to do all this stuff and see how it works.

“Everybody thinks I’m crazy, but it is more about the challenge than adrenaline of it. We’re going further than we ever thought possible. Flying from Brighton 100km away across the country, navigating air space with friends is such a unique experience, the perspectives you get and the challenges of using invisible thermals to travel across the country is just incredible.”