Kinewell

The organisation

Kinewell Energy’s Steven Ziolkowski is passionate about the company’s mission to provide scalable software solutions that improve offshore wind farm design, delivering cost savings and enhancing productivity.

Steven works closely with their flagship software product, KLOC, which optimises the decisions of connecting subsea cables between turbines. KLOC balances capital costs (CAPEX) and operating costs (OPEX) to return optimised layouts that would otherwise be inefficiently designed manually.  

Whilst developing artificial intelligence (AI) and optimisation techniques to deliver lower cost offshore wind farms with their software as a service (SaaS) product, Kinewell Energy know that part of their added value to the industry is the productivity gains acquired by engineers.

An independent report of the offshore wind champion cites a need to increase the skills pool threefold, from the current 27,000 to at least 100,000 employees by the end of the decade. This is to meet the UK’s ambitious target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030.

Any improvement in user modelling and interfacing time will help engineers within industry deliver the incredibly high volume of work needed to meet the offshore wind deployment ambition. Kinewell sought the help of the National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD) to provide productivity gains for engineers using their solutions on the KLOC platform. 

Machine learning

Our team was able to work with Steven to help Kinewell Energy develop an innovative machine learning model, which can provide important meta-data to the user to boost user productivity on the platform. Steven was particularly impressed with the breadth of our team’s knowledge and how each data scientist was able to offer expertise in different areas, including extracting information from their existing platform, using this to build a model and then deploying this model for use in production.  

Steven, who describes himself as an electrical engineer, says: “Through the collaboration and skills transferred I became and took on more of a role of a data scientist, being able to query data from a database, clean data, and go through standardised step-by-step methods.”  

One of Steven’s favourite things about the collaboration was the one-to-one interaction with various members of our data science team. “They were dynamic and flexible, and always very quick to respond,” he explains. “It made the whole project feel more fun and collaborative.”  

NICD Data Scientist Fergus McClean says: “Steven’s thirst for knowledge is inspiring. He’s constantly curious and working to learn more. And, because of his engineering background, he was also able to grasp a lot of the concepts very quickly. His passion for data science and the speed at which he grasped ideas helped the project progress at a good speed.” 

“What’s also interesting is that he is quite artistic,” Fergus adds. “For example, he is a musician, so he was able to approach some aspects of the project with an artistic mindset. It was really interesting to see the intersection of engineering, the creative side of things, and data science, and how they are all interlinked. It meant that he was able to think outside the box and come up with ideas and concepts that challenged us.” 

Our team primarily worked with Steven over the course of the collaboration, but Kinewell’s Founder and CEO Andrew Jenkins and R&D Engineer Claire Hislop were also involved at various stages. We worked on a lot of the project online, but also welcomed Steven and others from Kinewell Energy to The Catalyst for face-to-face sessions – our doors are always open for collaborators to come and work out of the building with us. 

Kinewell were able to bolster their core competencies of optimisation and advanced methods in an already excellent user interface, with new data science-related tools and techniques provided by the NICD team. 

"We equipped them with machine learning skills and the ability to work on projects independently in the future."

Fergus McClean, Data Scientist, National Innovation Centre for Data

Transferring skills 

From our perspective, it was fantastic to work with Kinewell Energy and develop a project from end-to-end. “We didn’t just go in and do the work for Kinewell Energy, as a consultant perhaps would,” explains Fergus. “Instead, we equipped them with machine learning skills and the ability to work on projects themselves in the future.” 

Kinewell Energy worked with NICD Data Scientists including Fergus, Mac Misiura, and Matt Edwards.  

Mac adds: “The problem-solving experience that Steven had was already impressive. He was always very curious and eager to learn more, and he spent a lot of hours doing things for himself outside of the sessions with us at NICD. So, we’ve made great progress. That’s one of the great things about working with Steven and the team at Kinewell – that simple desire to learn more.” 

"They were dynamic and flexible, and always very quick to respond. It made the whole project feel more fun and collaborative."

Steven Ziolkowski, R&D and Consultant Engineer, Kinewell Energy

With thanks to the North of Tyne Combined Authority Digital Growth and Innovation Programme (NTCA Digital) for funding this project.

To find out more about Kinewell, visit their website.

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