The Journey to POSET-renew

In  summer 1990, fresh from an intense couple of weeks in the US and customer acceptance tests back in the UK, I jumped on a train from the English Midlands to Southern Germany at the start of a 3-week holiday.  It was boiling hot and my reading for the journey was Ben Elton's "Stark" - set in a scenario of the breakdown of Earth's environment.  I'd heard about Global Warming (as it was called then), but knew little more than that.  Just before I had left, I'd heard Ben interviewed about the book and his view that the coming environmental emergency would be for our generation what the war was for our grandparents' -  with grandchildren asking the equivalent of "what did you do in the war?"  It had a profound influence on me, but I kept coming back to the question "what is my part in this?".  After the holiday, I headed back off the the US and had a wail of a time for a couple of years working hard and playing hard.  But the question was gnawing at the back of my brain.

On a mountain biking weekend in the Peak District with mates, I found a T-shirt with a message on which really connected with that gnawing issue.  My daughter has it now, even if it is rather tatty.  It reads "if you are not part of the cure, then you are part of the problem".  I kept noticing these words come up - or the alternative wording of "Part Of the Solution" (that'll be "POS" for short ... you'll notice the seed of a name being planted).  As engineers we tend not to be blue sky dreamers, but rather people who see a problem, get the brain cogs whirring, and apply our creativity and elbow grease to making it better.  Slowly, but steadily, being POS became a mantra for me.

But I was still working in heavy industry.  My time was devoted to work (as my career in leadership positions took off), my family (with our first child arriving in 1998) and whatever time was left to my other interests - mainly keeping fit and enjoying the great outdoors.  I partly consoled the gnawing thoughts that I was making a difference at work with energy savings and efficiencies, but it didn't make the gnawing go away, and as I learned more about the environmental crisis, saw more of the world around me, and started to join the dots, the gnawing grew stronger.

In 2002, I moved to Germany with work (for what was then called Alstom Power Conversion) and my young family.  I have subsequently become a bit of a Germanophile.  I think they get a lot of things right - or at least more right than we Brits and Americans - and particularly much more right on environmental issues and well ahead of us on implementing solutions.   At work, although I was concentrated on the metals rolling business, I got to know the team supplying converters to the nascent German wind industry.

Soon after my return to the UK, I became responsible for the Service business of Converteam, working across all of its markets past and present.  Converteam (which Alstom Power Conversion had now become) had just started working with Bonus Wind on fully fed converters, and converters from the German business had started to come into the UK - so I started to get personally involved in the wind market.  The Converteam UK team then built the first direct drive generator for Bonus (soon to become Siemens Wind Power) and engaged with many other wind, wave and tidal technology developers.  My team & I supported with the development of service concepts, but this was very much a small amount of my time, and I started to realise that I wanted renewable energy to be all of my working time.  I realised that the wind market was likely to be the industry that fit my skill set and interests best, and started exploring opportunities.

Eventually, an opportunity came up with Nordex that I really couldn't say "no" to - even though it meant moving my family and home from where we were very settled.   There followed nine very happy but challenging years working for a marvellous company, with great people, and a fantastic "can-do" culture.  There were times when it was seriously hard work, especially periods of rapid growth, and one year of significant crisis management (which included a front page of a UK national newspaper).    But I wasn't getting any younger, and the roles I took were not 40 hours a week roles.  I realised that there would come a point in my life when I'd not want to be devoting that much of my time and energy to work, and that this time was heading towards me fast.  I needed a plan for that day, and I paid a career coach to help me come up with one.  So when the consequences of the UK's near ban of onshore wind, a desire of a newly formed European Board at Nordex to repatriate powers from regional MDs back to HQ, and a gap in Nordex's product portfolio for the UK and Irish markets hit hard (I spent much of my last year at Nordex making the business case for what became the N133, and implementing the plan I'd agreed some years before to move critical resource away from new-builds to service - which reduced the scale of the downsizing process), I had the plan ready to go.

I set up POSET-renew Ltd over summer 2018, in between working on a loft conversion (from which one room became POSET-renew HQ) and taking a long road trip with my family.  My aim was to get to the point where: my income came from a mix of non-exec and consulting work; I worked full time in the energy transition; I had time to put roots down properly in my local community;  I could help my wife back into the workplace after years of her taking the front line of family care; I could be more available for my autistic son as he went through his teenage years.  I realised that early on, I might have to compromise in where I worked, and that I might also have to do some interim management.   

There have been challenges.  At  the start of the Covid pandemic, things went very quiet - although this coincided with me taking over as chair of Marple Runners, which took a lot of my time initially.  But I took the opportunity to go on every webinar and read every article on offshore wind I could - I already understood the turbine side very well, and I had offshore experience from my Converteam days, but there is a lot to offshore wind!  I also took the decision to find associates to work with -  people with different skill sets and networks but with similar attitudes and professionalism.   

It has been an enjoyable journey so far.  As I approach my 60s, I have absolutely no plans to retire.  My desire to be Part Of the Solution is too strong, and we really need solutions fast if the climate scientists are even remotely right.  If you want me to be Part Of your Solution, you know where to find me!

Stay POS!

Rich