Zachary Jylkka
Renewable Energy Program Specialist
Darin M. Lowder
Partner
Foley & Lardner LLP
Darin Lowder is a partner and business lawyer with Foley & Lardner LLP. He is a member of the firm’s Finance Practice and the Energy Industry Team. Darin focuses his practice on energy, project finance, project development, and related tax and public financing. He works to assist clients to efficiently address unique challenges in developing and financing renewable, alternative and conventional energy projects. Darin has focused on incorporating risk mitigants such as the growing energy-related insurance products and public-private partnerships (P3) as part of the ownership and financing structures evolving in this space.
Darin has unique experience representing lenders, other financing parties, and sponsors in innovative financing structures for P3 energy project financings, private placements, and bank and non-bank lending facilities. He has assisted clients with utility-scale, residential and commercial & industrial solar power projects (including for community solar power projects incorporating energy storage components), and large-scale wind projects in addition to his familiarity with other energy project technologies including offshore wind development, LNG terminals, combined heat and power/district heating & cooling projects, biomass and biofuel projects, and other energy and alternative energy technologies.
Darin has negotiated innovative energy output and investment tax credit insurance policies for solar power projects, helped to finance numerous community solar and other distributed generation portfolios, and managed diligence efforts, financing negotiations, and documentation for large utility scale renewable and conventional fuel projects. He also regularly represents lenders in other significant non-recourse project finance transactions.
He speaks regularly on project financing, structuring renewable energy transactions, negotiating power purchase agreements, and related community solar issues. In the past two years, he has assisted clients on projects totaling over 5,000 MW (5 gigawatts) worth more than $3.2 billion.
Lorry Wagner, Ph.D.
Director USA
Ventolines
Lead for Ventolines’ activities in the USA
• Co-chair OCRP-3-202x, American Clean Power Association
(formerly AWEA) Standards
• Board Member, Business Network for Offshore Wind
• Team Lead, U.S. Offshore Wind farms under development.
Paul McEvoy
Chief Technical Officer
Technology from Ideas
Paul completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin and is the original inventor of the TFI Marine Seaspring technology, being lead inventor on many of their patents. Paul is the Technical Director and co-founder of TFI and, as he will shortly tell you, has been leading the development of this technology. He will give you some insight into how the technology works and the current state of development, including certification, an FOWT demonstration and the commissioning of their new 15MW product factory in Ireland. He will soon be responsible for the largest injection moulded products in the world, producing 10 Tonne polymer parts for their mooring springs.
On completion of his PhD, Paul joined the Technology partnership, a Cambridge UK based technology consultancy. There he was a member of the scientific product division, developing and integrating new technologies into innovative products for customers. After leaving the UK and returning to Ireland, paul co-founded Technology from Ideas (TFI), to help the Irish university sector commercialise their innovations and technologies. Paul worked on hundreds of projects for the Irish universities, reviewing their projects and technologies, identifying target opportunities, validating these with the market, creating commercialisation support links between the interested companies and the universities, and building route to market development plans for the universities to follow. TFI also used their market knowledge to identify gaps in the market where new solutions were needed, sourcing or developing IP which could meet market needs. Spotting one of these market gaps, Paul developed the Seaspring technology and TFI Marine was born. He has worked on a wide range of renewable energy projects developing the Seaspring technology, including for wave (Wave Energy Scotland), tidal (H2020 Flotec) and floating wind (H2020 Flotant) projects. He has driven the expansion of the Seaspring technology into other markets (e.g. aquaculture) and applications (integrated sensors, power generation), leading to the development of new product and opportunities. He has also helped to build TFI Marine’s relationships with project developers, platform developers and EPCI contractors, working on many feasibility studies and supporting customer in house teams on evaluating the Seaspring. He has been the face of TFI Marine at many trade shows and conferences, presenting updates on the products and projects, while educating the industry on the benefits of the Seaspring load reduction device. He heads TFI Marine’s Mooring System Design team responsible customer mooring system modelling and Seaspring cost benefit analysis; leads the R&D team responsible for ongoing innovation; and oversees the Engineering team, responsible for delivering FEED studies or detailed design work for projects.
Cesar Del Vecchio
Senior Staff Consultant
Stress Engineering Services
Cesar has 35 years of experience in mooring systems incorporating fiber ropes. He has led Petrobras’ work that culminated with the installation of the first taut fiber moorings in Oil & Gas platforms in 1996. Presently he works for Stress Engineering and provides support on fiber moorings to NEAV 1 and NYSERDA Project 154676.
Matt Hall
Senior Engineer
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Matt Hall is a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He leads research efforts related to mooring systems, floating wind turbine optimization models, and design of floating arrays. He is also a founding organizer of IEA Wind Task 49 on Integrated Design of Floating Wind Arrays and leads its reference design work package. Matt’s 12 years of experience in floating wind research includes optimizing floating wind support structure designs, creating mooring dynamics models, improving wave-basin testing methods, and exploring the potential of shared mooring systems. He has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Maine.
Rogier S. Blom
Senior Principal Engineer, Controls & Optimization
GE Global Research
Dr. Rogier S. Blom is a research leader of advanced model-based controls for industrial applications and Senior Principal Engineer in the Controls & Optimization organization at GE Research. Since he joined GE in 2010, he has led multiple programs and teams developing advanced controls solutions in several of GE’s industrial verticals such as Renewables, Aviation, and Power Generation, as well as horizontals like Additive Manufacturing, Robotics, and Digital. His current focus areas include Floating Offshore Wind and Green Hydrogen. He is Principal Investigator of the ARPA-e funded project “Control Co-design and Co-Optimization of a Lightweight 12 MW Wind Turbine on an Actuated Tension Leg Platform”. Prior to joining GE, Rogier worked for 5 years in the Telecommunications industry in various leadership roles. Rogier has a M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Twente (cum laude) and a Ph.D. degree in Systems and Controls from Delft University of Technology, both in the Netherlands.
Christopher Allen, M.Sc., P.E.
Senior Research Engineer
University of Maine
Chris Allen is a Senior Research Engineer working at the Advanced Structures and Composites Center located at the University of Maine where he has spent the last 12 years of his career focused on the development of ocean renewable energy. A native to Southern Maine, he holds a Master’s of Science in Structural Engineering from UMaine and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the same field. Chris has significant experience in basin model testing of offshore structures and is actively involved in the University’s new Harold Alfond W2 Ocean Engineering Lab where he leads testing programs on systems ranging from semisubmersibles to wave energy converters. His interests in ocean renewable energy began during his Graduate studies where he was part of a team which designed, built, and launched VoltrunUS 1:8, the first floating wind turbine in the Americas. He is currently involved with Maine Aqua Ventus which is a 12 MW floating offshore wind pilot project committed to developing a clean, renewable energy source off Maine’s shores.
Eben Lenfest
Research Engineer
University of Maine
Eben is a research engineer at the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center. He specializes in data analysis and numerical modeling in support of scale model wind/wave basin tests of floating offshore wind turbines.
Eben received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maine in 2021. His research focused on the areas of blade pitch and structural controls for floating offshore wind turbines in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
Josiah McVicar, PE
