How does the culture at Zühlke support a project like this?
I would say that as a general cultural thing, everybody is interested and excited by doing things at scale. It’s a character of person who isn’t just interested in doing ordinary things. They’re motivated by doing things of consequence. So what you find is that even if people haven’t worked in an area before, they’ve probably been doing some digging or playing around in it. So, it was very easy to form a team of people who were interested and up to speed in this area.
Over and above government R&D funding, one of the big energy giants has provided people to help our project achieve more. Zühlke has also invested, which demonstrates great commitment to the future, to secure more work with interesting engineering, design and business challenges, in topics that people care about themselves.
People can also see the potential of where this could go and how their skill set applies. It hasn’t been just in the UK. We’ve had collaboration from the international business too. It’s almost odd. Zühlke was founded in the 60s with this electrical and mechanical engineering capability so it was designed from the get-go to be the right organisation to do this. People in the electricity industry know we’ve got it.