My Journey into Renewable Energy Transition

The transition from traditional Oil and Gas control systems to renewable energy infrastructure hasn’t just been a career shift—it’s been a profound shift in mindset.

The Early Days in O&G

When I first started in automation, the focus was purely on uptime, safety, and throughput within legacy SCADA environments. Designing interlocks for high-pressure separation vessels taught me the uncompromising nature of industrial operations. There were no “soft” failures.

But around 2022, I started noticing the shift…

Moving to Offshore Wind

Offshore wind presents a fundamentally different automation challenge. Instead of a centralized, massive production facility, you are dealing with hundreds of highly distributed, autonomous systems (the turbines) acting essentially as edge computing nodes.

• We swapped proprietary PLCs for more open networked controllers.
• Predictive maintenance became driven by ML models running locally on the turbine edge rather than back at the historian.

This journey is just beginning. What I’ve learned is that the stringent safety and reliability standards perfected by the O&G sector over decades are exactly what the renewable sector needs right now to scale securely.