An Interview with Ajai Ahluwalia
Ajai Ahluwalia is an electrical engineer that specialises in UK offshore wind farms. He is currently working at Equinor as one of the Technical Leads on the world’s largest offshore wind farm in development, Dogger Bank. On top of this, Ajai is Vice Chair on the shadow board of RenewableUK and a Director of Lambeth Community Solar, a local renewable energy generation project.
Sam Wilson and Ross Baxter caught up with Ajai before he joins our panel of speakers at our upcoming event: Climate Change and Your Career.
21st May 5pm (BST) register HERE
Ajai, how did you get into engineering and renewables?
Since growing up in Leeds, I’ve always been interested in renewables and even built my own wind turbine when I was 13! I’ve now worked in offshore wind for over 10 years, but it took quite a bit of time to get there and it also took sacrifice moving around the country several times to get to the position I’m in now.
The energy industry was very different back in 2006 when I graduated from university. Despite my best efforts trying to get into the renewable energy sector as part of a graduate scheme, I just couldn’t get in. I continued to have the urge to work in renewables but in the meantime I worked in the defence industry as an engineer. I then decided to do a second graduate scheme with Centrica. This felt like a step back, in a way, starting another grad job but it was a great opportunity to work for an energy company which would hopefully take me into the renewables sector.
Finally, in 2010 once I’d had developed my knowledge of electrical engineering and completed some retraining, I started work for Centrica Renewables on the what was world’s biggest offshore wind farm (194MW) at that time, Lynn and Inner Dowsing.
How has your career developed since specialising in offshore wind?
After a couple of years I decided to join Scottish Power renewables and moved to London to work on various different offshore wind projects.
In 2015 I then joined Statoil (now Equinor) and left London to help build and operate the Dudgeon offshore wind farm off the coast of Norfolk. Equinor now has a proud heritage of being an oil and gas company that has been in transition to focus more on renewables.
In April 2020 I joined the Dogger Bank project, which will be the largest offshore wind project in the world, 3.6GW! I am currently the technical lead for the HDVC package which is all of the technology that links the turbines offshore to the grid on land.
Sound like you have a lot of your plate! Do you manage to fit any other roles around your day job?
On the side of my engineering job, I am the vice chair for the shadow board of RenewableUK. This gives me a great visibility of what’s happening across the UK industry.
I’m also Director of a local community solar project. I’m a big believer in the distributed energy model. If it’s possible to generate energy at the point of consumption this will be an important part of reducing carbon emissions in the power sector
I was also asked to be a representative on the offshore wind sector deal: an industry and government led partnership which amongst other things looks at jobs and skills in the UK offshore wind sector. This has seen us setting goals and considering:
At least a third of the workforce to be female;
At least 9% of the workforce to be people of colour or that identify as an ethnic minority;
Apprenticeship agenda
I’m also a member of a Union called Prospect. This is a non-party affiliated union which has campaigned for renewables for a long time. It also pitches to various parties and policy makers on the Just Transition which is the aim of securing the jobs and livelihoods of everyone as we shift to a more sustainable future.
Thank you very much Ajai! We look forward to hearing more from you at “Climate Change and Your Career” on 21st May