Meet the Jury of this years Offshore Wind Innovators Awards!

Once again we organise the Offshore Wind Innovators Award. Our jury will select the most innovative SME in the offshore energy sector of 2022. This year Simon Watson (TU Delft), Jakob Bergvelt (Green Giraffe) and Suzanne van de Beek (Vattenfall) are the members of the jury.

Simon Watson received a B.Sc. in physics from Imperial College, London in 1987 and a Ph.D. from Edinburgh University in 1990. He has been working in the field of wind energy since 1990 and began his career at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In 1999, he moved to what later became Good Energy, a supplier of green electricity. In 2001, he was appointed as a senior lecturer at the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology at Loughborough University and in 2010, he was made Professor of Wind Energy. In 2017, he moved to TU Delft to take up the position of Professor of Wind Energy Systems and Director of the TU Delft Wind Energy Institute (DUWIND). His areas of research interest include wind climate, wind resource assessment, wind turbine wakes and wind turbine reliability and condition monitoring. Prof Watson is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Wind Energy journal.

Jakob Bergvelt started at Green Giraffe as a financial modeler on the Gemini offshore wind project (600 MW, the Netherlands, 2014) and from there, grew into project management and supervisory roles. Jakob has assisted on a wide array of advisory, debt raising and tender missions in the onshore wind, offshore wind and solar PV space. Apart from the initial Gemini financing, he was also closely involved in the teams advising Norther (370 MW, Belgium, 2016), the refinancing of Gemini (600 MW, the Netherlands, 2017) and the Zeewolde onshore wind project (322 MW, the Netherlands, 2020). Jakob also advised consortia on bid structuring, strategy and preparation for offshore wind tenders in the Netherlands and Germany, and carried out strategic consulting missions. More recently, Jakob is involved in the debt raising of a large offshore wind farm in Poland. Prior to joining Green Giraffe, Jakob was involved in a joint research project of the Dutch embassy in Beijing and the Rathenau Institute. Based in Beijing, he studied the development of sustainability in China. Jakob holds an MA from the University of Amsterdam and a certificate of graduate studies from Smith College.

Suzanne van de Beek is Development and Consents Manager at Vattenfall, where she is responsible for managing the Dutch offshore wind bids and involved in various innovation programmes. She previously worked with the offshore supply chain for the UK Department for International Trade, and has a background in international affairs complemented by a short stint at a drone start-up.