Providing Senior and Director level Strategic and Commercial Consulting Services to offshore renewable energy clients and other sustainable solutions companies. Current clients include Blackfish Engineering Design / Blackfish Scotland Ltd (bespoke engineering design for wind, wave & tidal energy technology developers), and the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, where I lead their work in offshore wind, and in particular the project to develop an £88m National Floating Wind Test Centre for the UK.Previous clients include Edinburgh-based Locogen (onshore wind, solar, BESS, & hydrogen), and a pre-announcement startup looking at oyster bed restoration co-located with offshore wind farms and other renewables.

Working as an Associate on long-term contract I lead EMEC's plans to add a multiple-berth floating offshore wind test centre to its existing wave, tidal, and hydrogen test facilities.With strong winds and big waves the multiple-berth site ~20km west of Orkney is a step beyond the existing 'one owner one technology' demonstrator projects already seen, and will be a key National Laboratory for the UK and industry for proving and de-risking a wide variety of floating wind technologies prior to commercial-scale deployment.Additionally, I have been supporting the work of EMEC’s Research and Innovation Programme, including helping to shape the challenge areas that will be the key focus of the next stage of that project, and which may also be expanded to include other project developers facing similar challenges.

Blackfish provide bespoke mechanical engineering design, structural engineering analysis, and technical review services for the offshore renewable energy sector - principally wind, wave, and tidal technology developers. Additionally, Blackfish are developing a range of technical solution products in-house and with partners. These include the TRIC quick-release tower clamping system for fixed-bottom wind, the C-DART temporary mooring solution for floating wind, and in-farm and in-port electric vessel charging systems (in partnership with MJR). I work as a strategic advisor to the company covering all aspects of growing and developing the business, including the recent setup and expansion of its Blackfish Scotland Ltd subsidiary here in Edinburgh.

RCH is the multiply-evolved semi-passive property investment business that sits behind my full time professional roles. With several pivots, two successful exits, and even a partial retirement, I am very pleased that 2024 will be my 33rd year running my own businesses! 🙂😀🤣

Helping the Boston-based founders commercialise and bring their open-architecture floating offshore wind platform concept to Scotland for further technical development and proving at scale. I succeeded in winning a place for T-Omega on the NZTC's 2022 TechX accelerator programme, securing £100,000 of grant funding to complete early stage computational and physical modelling at the National Decommissioning Centre and the Kelvin Hydrodynamics Laboratory at Strathclyde University.

Short-term role helping Sustainable Marine spin out its ‘rapid anchoring in fast currents’ expertise into a separate new business; accessing wider markets, expanding the business case, and developing new applications such as floating wind. Following a restructuring sale SME's 'Holdfast Anchors' technologies are now marketed as part of the Schottel Marine Technologies offering.

Renewable energy technologies subject matter expert investigating how the University of Edinburgh could transition to become the world’s first net zero University. My team investigated 72 novel and proven technologies across the entire clean-tech spectrum and evaluated and down-selected them to five significant investments that between them would allow the University to flip from >100,000 tonnes annual CO2e emissions to net negative. This across the University's fleet of five campuses, including teaching, administration, and specialist research facilities, and more than 600 individual buildings.

CEO of the £11.3m FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility at the University of Edinburgh. As its CEO I led the SPV team through the first 2 years of construction & commissioning and the first 3 years of commercial operations, welcoming a wide range of technology developers to the tank for model-scale concept-proving and mission-critical de-risking.

Offshore Wind due diligence technical team leader during SgurrEnergy era. Altogether I led or supported the pre-FID technical DD of around 20 offshore wind projects in German and UK waters , and was Sgurr’s offshore O&M strategy specialist (or more informally, their 'helicopters and boats expert').I also carried out model-specific wind turbine technical reviews, was involved in at least one serial defect investigation, and supported Morgan Stanley with a Chinese turbine OEM IPO on the Hang-Seng.I'm very pleased to see that two of the excellent engineers I trained are now technical directors on two of the biggest OSW projects in ScotWind. 👏👏

Carrying out 5 and 10 year business and workload forecasts for Rolls Royce's helicopter engines division, plus a more sensitive role carrying out 'special investigation' projects.