Who's going to be at Financing Wind Europe?

Before you commit to buying a ticket to an event, you what to know who you're going to be in a room with. In this post, client services manager Ellen Lloyd looks at who is likely to be in the room at our Financing Wind Europe conference in October 2019.

For more information on this year's event, please visit our Financing Wind website.

It’s one of the most common questions we hear from our potential event attendees. Who else is going to be at the room at this year’s conference?

We get it. Nobody want to spend time and money going to an event that isn’t a good fit for their needs. In this piece, we’re going to let you know who you can expect to be in the room if you come to Financing Wind Europe, and the rationale behind this.

We’re not a trade show

The first thing to know about Financing Wind Europe is that it isn’t a trade show. We don’t have multiple halls and thousands of attendees. Our focus is on smaller events with 200-300 attendees where we can focus on providing higher-quality networking.

In practice, this means we get a good spread of people who work on developing and investing in wind projects, as well as those who advise them and want to learn more about the financial side of the sector. Our goal has always been to get people talking about finance, whether they’re financiers themselves or just interested to learn more.

If your goal is to go to a massive hall and spend two days encouraging people to try your new harness or blade coating system, then this probably isn’t the room for you.

Will Financing Wind Europe work for you? Click here

Who’s going to be there?

In some respects, this is an impossible question to answer. We know who is likely to be in the room, based on previous events we have run and because we have a good idea of who in our community is likely to be there. But it is tough to say for certain.

There are also limits on what we can share. European Union GDPR rules mean that we have to protect the privacy and data security of members and event attendees. In practice, this imposes restrictions on what we can share publicly before an event.

That’s the bad news. However, there is some better news. Here are the three best sources of information we'd recommend checking to make your decision.

1) Conference agenda

The first useful source of information about who’s going to be there is the line-up of speakers on the conference agenda on the Financing Wind website. These are the speakers who have confirmed, and our current agenda shows senior names from…

• Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners
• EDP Renovaveis
• Engie
• Green Investment Group
• LM Wind Power
• Luxcara
• MHI Vestas
• Northland Power
• Pure New Energy
• Red Rock Power
• Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy

We can never guarantee 100% that someone will be there until they're up on stage, but these are the people we're looking forward to hosting. We find that many of our speakers choose to stay for a large section of the day so they can network themselves, and hear the contributions of their peers on earlier or later panel sessions.

Click here for the Financing Wind Europe agenda

2) Last year's attendees

The second useful source of information is the statistics on last year’s attendees, which I’m going to quickly break down here. Last year, we got a total of 200 people in the venue throughout the day, with the majority of them staying for the whole day.

The attendee types broke down like this:

• Bankers / investors (23% of attendees)
• Developers / utilities (20%)
• Advisors / consultants (19%)
• Manufacturers / O&M (16.5%)
• Lawyers (16%)
• Others (5.5%)

That means there is a good mix of people who are building projects, developing the technology that helps drive down the levelised cost of wind energy, and investing in new schemes. We were set up to build connections between the financial and the technical sides of the industry, and this remains a cornerstone of our approach.

3) Community statistics

And the third useful source of information is the statistics on our community.

Our membership is comprised of C-suite individuals (30%), company directors and heads of department (23%), senior management (11%), management (22%), and those at other levels (14%). It is typically weighted towards people at the top levels. That means we have a high proportion of senior people in the room at our events.

However, I’d say to newer people in the industry, please don’t let that put you off!

While it’s true that we don’t tend to have as many attendees from junior levels, we also want to create a friendly atmosphere that is welcoming to everyone. If you’re curious and committed to finding out more about the financial side of the industry, and bringing your own ideas to put in the mix, we’d love to talk to you more.

If you have more questions about our events then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me or someone else in our team.