Building wind: An interview with Dr Ian Mays, CEO, Renewable Energy Systems Ltd
✍ Scribed by Alice Hohler
- Book ID
- 104439233
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 54 KB
- Volume
- 7
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1471-0846
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
I
n 1990, RES built the UK's second (and then largest) wind farm -fifteen 400kW Vestas turbines at Carland Cross in Cornwall, with an installed capacity of 6MW. Since then it has hardly paused for breath, and by the end of 2005 it had passed the milestone of a massive 1GW of installed wind power worldwide across nearly 40 projects, half of which are outside the UK. RES was formed by engineering and construction group Sir Robert McAlpine in 1981 with just one employee; Dr Ian Mays, its CEO, who is due to receive his gold watch for 25 years' service. From scratch, Mays has created one of the world's leading wind power companieswith nearly 200 employees and offices in the UK, France, Sweden, Australia and the US.
Yet you would hardly think so on meeting Mays, a low-key and quietly charming man whose character seems to be imprinted on RES, a company which comes across as thoroughly competent and sure of its own ability, but far from arrogant. If RES is one of the most familiar and respected corporate faces of the wind industry, then Mays is its human equivalent. Not surprisingly, then, his personal high points have also been those of the business he has built: RES's first wind farm at Carland Cross, the construction of the vast 278MW wind ranch at King Mountain in Texas, the creation of RES's zero-carbon head office at Beaufort Court (which received the Queen's Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development in 2005) and crossing the 1GW barrier.