Plugging renewable power into your homes  

As a Chartered structural and civil engineer, I have watched the renewable energy revolution unfold across my 25-year career with WSP. Wind capacity has grown from 320MW to 24GW, this means an astonishing 73-fold increase from 2001-2021.  

I have spent much of my career creating infrastructure to move energy generated from offshore turbines, through subsea cables and into peoples’ homes. This included working for Siemens Energy as WSP’s engineering and design lead on the development of the Western Link HVDC Interconnector project. This £1.2bn, 262-mile subsea link transfers 2.2GW of power from Scottish windfarms in the Irish sea to one million homes across England and Wales.  

This experience working with some of the world’s biggest renewables companies’ powers my passion – pun intended - to help deliver a net zero carbon world. For me, collaborative working and partnerships are essential to establishing a culture that allows everyone to work to towards a common purpose to deliver net zero. 

Bringing the world’s biggest bands to Teesside 

Many fellow Teessiders dream of stepping out at the Riverside Stadium to play football for Middlesbrough FC. While I didn’t make it onto the pitch, I achieved the next best thing, and I have been the club’s consultant structural engineer since 2013.  

While I am “long suffering supporter”, I have loved working with the football club, local authorities and the stadium safety advisory group to ensure the Riverside Stadium is suitable to host all types of sport and music events. This has involved detailed structural assessments of the stadium and the production of a full interactive 3D model. This allowed us to do dynamic modelling and stress testing to ensure the stadium is ready to host some of the world’s biggest bands.  

I am proud to have played a small but very important role in ensuring the thousands of fans lucky enough to enjoy seeing Take That in 2019 did so safely! We are looking forward to welcoming Nevadan rockers The Killers to the stadium in 2022.  

Looking to the past to inspire a clean prosperous future for Teesside  

I am one of one of the thin red line of remaining professional engineers practicing on Teesside. We were all taught by and revered the best engineers in the world that practised their profession on Teesside. They mentored me and had faith in me to uphold the great engineering heritage and traditions that made our area a hotbed of engineering knowledge, I believe second to none. 

I will honour their legacy and memory by giving my best, to the regeneration of Teesside and its people, who deserve so much more. We all must do our bit to ensure a clean prosperous future for Teesside by actively forging partnerships and collaborative working arrangements across suppliers, partners and clients around a common aim of regenerating Teesside to match and exceed its past glories.  

The skills, experience and knowledge that we obtained from the steel mills, chemical plants, blast furnaces and heavy industry that made our area, allowed us to design and build the natio’s critical infrastructure, buildings and structures. Now we have the opportunity to design and rebuild the area that made us engineers. No team talk is required. Forty years in the making, so let’s take this opportunity and grab it with both hands.  The modern Teesside anthem is ‘We Shall Overcome’.  We sang this at the matches to keep our spirits up. Now the Spirit of Teesside has returned. Phoenix from the Ashes. Let’s work together for a better, brighter future.