BY ANDREW STATTER
A few years ago, we saw this peculiar situation play out in the offshore wind sector: Japan tried to hire almost all of its needed talent pool from within its own borders, despite having only a couple of small operational offshore wind farms.
Much of that talent pool came from other renewables (solar primarily), as well as from oil and gas or conventional energy, especially in engineering disciplines. For two reasons, this became a clear handicap for offshore wind.
First, offshore wind is a very complex industry that requires hiring experienced talent. Second, as a nascent market, many players look to hire from the same extremely narrow talent pool. In the end, the math simply did not add up.
Today we face a similar challenge across flexibility markets, power trading, forecasting, and some of the data science and machine learning disciplines. As energy trading volumes increase, new players enter the market, and more flexible assets come online, these skills, which are still rare in Japan, face increasing demand. Japan has some talent in this space, but not enough to cater to the rapidly growing market.
This isn’t a temporary gap. Japan’s energy market liberalization only began in earnest in 2016. The talent pipeline is structurally behind the investment pipeline, and the gap is widening as capital flows in faster than people can be trained.
Functions where this bites hardest now are: power traders with futures and structured product experience; forecasting and analytics specialists; BESS optimization and asset managers.