Training workers for offshore wind
The Education Council for Offshore Wind
Building a huge, expensive, high-tech industry that will power a major economy as fast as possible and as safely as possible. That’s essentially what Japan’s trying to do with offshore wind.
As the most promising renewable energy source for Japan, offshore wind needs to scale up explosively. But as a nascent industry, there are countless obstacles standing in the way. One of them is the need for a deep pool of highly skilled workforce.
Last month, the Japanese government announced a public-private initiative to foster the human resources needed to meet its offshore wind targets of 10 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity by 2030 and between 30 - 45 GW by 2040.
The initiative is called the Education Council for Offshore Wind or ECOWIND. This is one of the best examples of what government can do to prod along the growth of the clean energy transition. But I haven’t seen much (or at all) coverage in English, so let’s take a closer look at this initiative here.
ECOWIND
The Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry very briefly introduced ECOWIND in a press conference on June 11 with these words:
today, the Education Council for Offshore Wind (ECOWIND) will be established. This council, comprised of power generation and construction companies, among other business operators, will cooperate with education and research institutions to train workers for the offshore wind power industry through measures such as preparing curriculums based on the industry’s needs.
Okay, all of that needs to be unpacked.
How does ECOWIND work?
ECOWIND has a sound premise.
Here’s METI’s rationale. The offshore wind industry (especially when including floating offshore) is vastly complex, multi-staged, and new for Japan. So it’s critical to bring the government, industry, and academia together to formulate a framework for developing the workforce precisely in the way that’s needed for the growth of the industry.
The agreement signed between the founding organizations gives us the specifics about what ECOWIND will do (translated and edited by yours truly for brevity and clarity):
ECOWIND aims to connect firms with students by matching the workforce and educational needs of industry and educational institutions, such as technical colleges and universities. This includes site visits and internships for students, dispatching lecturers for on-site classes at schools, fostering public understanding of offshore wind power, and strengthening the ties across regional industry-academia activities.
No further details are available yet. Specific programs, events, and so on will be discussed in future meetings between ECOWIND participants.
ECOWIND’s players
Who are the organizations involved in ECOWIND? First, let’s take a look at these “education and research institutions” that keep popping up.
First is the Promotion and Research Institute for Ocean Economics (RIOE), a think tank dedicated to, as its name suggests, economic and scientific research on the marine industries to promote those industries.
Second and no less important is the National Institute of Technology (abbreviated in Japanese to Kosen). Kosen is a unique, five-year vocational school focused on science and engineering with campuses throughout Japan. Kosen has an initiative called COMPASS 5.0, geared toward workforce development, defining and honing skill sets, and creating teaching materials in next generation technologies (like AI, mathematical data science, cybersecurity, robotics, IoT, semiconductors, and storage batteries) through industry-academia collaboration. Under ECOWIND, technologies related to offshore wind will be newly added as a COMPASS 5.0 target area.
Aside from these education and research organizations, ECOWIND crucially includes some heavy-weight private-sector players too. The nine power companies spearheading the initiative are some of the largest energy, engineering, and general trading companies:
Beyond these 11 organizations, ECOWIND will be recruiting other companies and organizations involved in offshore wind to support the initiative. This would include power generation companies, companies engaged in engineering, procurement, construction, and installation, wind turbine and parts manufacturers, marine vessel manufacturers and operators, and survey and analysis firms.
It hasn’t released detailed recruitment information yet, but it’s encouraging organizations to contact RIOE at rioe@rioe.or.jp.
Need for more workers
How bad is the need for a skilled workforce that ECOWIND is trying to solve?
There’s a big gap between offshore wind’s potential to become among the main clean energy sources and a promising export sector for Japan on the one hand, and the dearth of skilled workers to make these dreams a reality on the other.
Exact figures on the current number of workers in Japan’s offshore wind industry was hard to find. One figure I was able to find was in a report by the Global Wind Organization and Global Wind Energy Council (GWO & GWEC). This excerpt from their October 2023 joint report Global Wind Workforce Outlook 2023-2027 gives us a glimpse:
The GWO trained workforce in Japan increased from 60 people in 2018 to 1,600 in 2022.
And then here’s a graph with a GWO & GWEC projection of how many workers in construction and installation (C&I) and operations and maintenance (O&M) Japan will need to scale up offshore wind between 2022-2027.
Explaining this graph, GWO & GWEC write:
The number of C&I and O&M technicians in Japan is expected to more than double from 2,400 in 2022 to 5,100 in 2027. This growth will be fueled by the rapidly emerging offshore wind market. GWO estimates that by 2027 the C&I and O&M trained workforce could be expanded by 3,900 people in addition to the 1,600 already active, as of the end of 2021.
That’s the short-term picture. The Japan Wind Power Association (JWPA) has a much longer-term projection of the workforce the industry will need if installed offshore wind capacity is to reach the government’s targets by 2040 and 2050.
This chart uses data from JWPA’s October 2023 report that estimates the necessary number of workers.
The report concludes that:
by 2030, 8 GW of offshore capacity will require 15,700 workers
by 2040, 45 GW of offshore capacity will need 38,200 workers
by 2050, 100 GW of offshore capacity will need 48,500 workers
If you take a second to compare the JWPA and GWO & GWEC figures, you’ll notice a big gap between GWO & GWEC’s 2027 projection (5,100 workers) and JWPA’s 2030 projection (15,700). It’s highly unlikely that an industry workforce will more than triple in size in just three years. I attribute this gap to the fact that GWO & GWEC are only counting O&M and C&I technicians, whereas the JWPA report covers a much broader workforce ecosystem, including staff in project development, finance, insurance, manufacturing, design, and much more in addition to O&M and C&I. For that reason, I prefer JWPA’s estimate more.
Regardless, it’s fair to say that Japan’s offshore wind is in dire need for skilled workers to support the rapid growth that we expect over the next few decades. Programs like ECOWIND is exactly the right initiative for this.
Thank you for sharing this initiative. It is the first time I have heard about this long-term project to develop a promising source of renewable energy. What an amazing opportunity for a budding engineer. As you point out, it sounds like the task of securing enough human talent in Japan is a critical issue. Perhaps Japan could tap into India's legions of engineers.
Despite the fact that a significant amount of capital expenditure is required, while there is no doubt that the planned offshore wind farms sound promising, how does this source of renewable energy compare to the potential of harnessing geothermal energy? See below for reference:
https://open.substack.com/pub/realgaijin/p/some-like-it-hot-japanese-supermarket