United Kingdom
Senior international leader with 8+ years of executive-level experience across major global organisations. Proven track record in building high performing, psychologically safe teams and leading transformation across complex, multi market environments. Adept at navigating political, commercial, technical, and operational landscapes to deliver project value at pace. Board level contributor with strong advocacy for organisational change, inclusion, and strategic alignment.
Sophie leads the global function and disciplines that manage the permitting and environmental compliance, grid and commercial development, land and real estate and local stakeholder engagement across and on the projects. - Permitting, consents and environmental compliance efforts ensuring adherence to all relevant country regulations. - Providing solutions for local stakeholder management to the projects including coastal and indigenous communities. - Developing and executing commercial project strategies, negotiating key agreements that enhance project viability. - Managing the commercial, regulatory and relationships with grid operators and owners - Manage land acquisition and access agreements, optimizing project land strategies for infrastructure leasing. - Tracking legislation across all disciplines to advise projects and company of significant changes and risk profiles
Sophie leads bp's Offshore Wind UK Project Development Support and Permitting function, the department covers 4 main areas – Stakeholder Engagement & Cross Portfolio, Consenting, Commercial & Land and Project Support. Sophie has built the teams up from the ground utilising the best of bp’s inhouse knowledge and the best of the expertise in the wider offshore wind industry in the UK. Sophie’s team have led the example in safety within bp OFW by achieving 100% in their annual Pulse employee survey scores in the psychological safety indices. Sophie has facilitated strong relationships with bp OFW UK’s JV with EnBW, creating an enhanced and aligned approach to recruitment and team building to enable delivery of the Mona, Morgan and Morven projects. Sophie's team have supported and delivered bp's winning INTOG bid project, Flora. Sophie has worked within the Leadership Team in the UK to develop the UK OFW strategy and business strategy, build wider understanding in bp about offshore wind and has pushed for continued integration across all of bp UK’s entities including the North Sea, Hydrogen and CCUS. She has worked with other internal departments globally to set up and agree the right scopes to deliver projects within the UK, utilising her global offshore wind knowledge. Sophie has actively put forward strategies for bp in the UK in relation to workstreams to combine and streamline resources across key discipline areas such as Real Estate and Land in the UK – which have resulted to the formalisation of Communities of Practice in these key areas. Sophie has created cross regional best practice with her PDSP peers to drive a streamlined and value adding approach to sharing resource and enabling lessons learnt across the disciplines. This includes acting as a Transition champion to roll out processes across the regions, support centralised resourcing platforms and showcase PDSP skill sets at the global Offshore Townhalls.
Sophie led and managed the Consenting team for the Hornsea Project Two 1.8GW Offshore Wind farm, which is currently the largest offshore wind farm in the world. The Secretary of State granted Hornsea Project Two full consent on the 16th August 2016, which is now the most cost-effective offshore wind farm in the world to be in operation. Sophie successfully retained and enabled her entire Consent team to deliver throughout the Project Two intensive and time pressured Nationally Significant Infrastructure Process (NSIP) examination to achieve a commercially viable consent, whilst completing a major project takeover of SMart Wind (SMW) by Ørsted, managing a shift in Natural England’s position in relation to a key consent risk bird species, a new European designation over the site and a major change in the structure of the determining Government body. Sophie reported directly to the COO of SMW Offshore and sat on the SMW Board, identifying the key consent risks and benefits that required mitigation, resulting in a successful submission of the Project Two application to the Planning Inspectorate (PINS). This included producing Governance and Management documents, which have resolved internal and zone disputes, enabling the determination of difficult and challenging issues without sacrificing future multi-billion-pound projects. The role included liaising with multiple stakeholders at all levels of the consultation spectrum, for example statutory bodies. The communication strategy that Sophie employed resulted in no Open Floor Hearing for Project Two and a well-briefed Examiner Panel, thus reducing potential delays to the project consent and this enabled early publication of Hearing agendas and allowed for better preparation by the team. She participated in industry steering groups for offshore wind renewables in general to move policy, research, and innovative solutions forward for the industry
Sophie led the Continental Europe (CE) Project Development team and ran the global Centre of Expertise in Project Development. This team delivers multiple bids, development strategies and ultimately delivers projects to execution across the CE region. The team is formed of Director level individuals who manage business cases, bid submissions, technical inputs across all packages, stakeholder strategy, joint venture management, commercial outputs and all associated boundary conditions on the Projects, which not only consist of offshore wind farms but hydrogen, storage and unique concepts that were highly confidential. As part of the global Centre of Expertise Sophie also delivered global improvements and knowledge sharing across all of Orsted’s regions – CE, UK, North America and the Asia Pacific regions. This includes working to deliver effective strategies and processes at a senior leadership, project developer and technical developer level to ensure Orsted’s global processes are adapted to each of the markets. Sophie was a key leader in facilitating improvements across the regions from Orsted’s technical and product line packages including standardising inputs and advising projects that progress through the internal governance model prior to be delivered to the Board for approval. Sophie is proactively involved globally in Orsted’s Diversity and Inclusion networks and a passionate advocate for driving Orsted to progress and increase it’s diversity and equality commitments through an intersectional lens. Sophie led the first International Men’s Day celebrations within Orsted and worked with the senior leadership team on reverse mentoring programmes.
I manage the UK Consents team which are formed of Consents UK - Development and Consents UK Construction and Operations and Maintenance within the UK. This not only includes line managing but ensuring that a consistent approach is taken to all Projects from Consents within the UK Portfolio and managing significant challenges and opportunities to the UK portfolio. This requires a strategic view across the UK project portfolio and recognition of the application of these issues in relevance to non UK markets such as Northern Europe, the US and APAC.
Sophie was responsible for the progress and management of onshore wind and solar projects across the country from attending Public Consultation events in Fife to wind farm visits in Cornwall. Sophie’s role involved site identification, initiating landowner contact and progressing legal agreements. Sophie’s negotiation skills resulted in securing Option agreements with a variety of landowners, from small-scale farms to multinational corporations, such as Imerys. She managed sites through the planning system, appointing Environmental Impact Assessment consultants, managing the political liaison and local and regional public consultation. The planning submission process involved contacting statutory consultees, liaising with Local Planning Authorities and managing project budgets. Sophie carried out due diligence on operating sites in relation to future wind and solar development, enabling REG Wind power to successfully divest several operating wind and solar farms to multinational investment firm Black Rock. She restructured the Public Exhibition documents and the Environmental Statement templates to create streamlined documents for the entire team to be able to use and create a consistent approach to the public engagement and planning applications, which resulted in clearly project envelopes. Sophie created processes for enhanced interaction between the Development, Construction (including Grid) and Operations teams and rationalised the budget management process. She worked closely with our Operations team to help manage issues on our operating sites that may affect extensions, repowering and other future development, thus creating a better climate for divestment and investment. She negotiated a ground-breaking agreement with local cooperative Bristol Energy Coop to enable them to have an option to purchase their own large-scale wind development, which reduced local objections to the wind farm project and created a more legally robust appeal process
Sophie led the Department of PEMA, with over 40 high performing and dedicated individuals to progressing Ørsted’s North American (NA) portfolio of projects. Sophie reported directly into the NA COO to ensure the development of the market was sustainable for the Ørsted strategy, whilst growing the teams, collaborating with the global functions and challenging the internal stakeholders on the market differences to enable Ørsted to continue to expand globally and deliver results. Sophie’s role ensured that the Department effectively progressed the Projects through the various stages of the NA permitting processes, including the early stage bids, development, construction and operation. A key part of the role is engaging with stakeholders at multiple levels in external organisations in the career and political areas related to the PEMA functions, including the regulatory agencies, cooperating agencies, the states and eNGOs. Sophie dedicated significant support to the commercial viability of the Projects to ensure that the Permit requirements will enable a financially sound business case to be constructed and operated for the Offshore portfolio. Sophie ran several cross-portfolio cost reduction workstreams that streamlined and reduced costs to each Project thus improving the business case including proactive risk tracking, floating options for the West Coast of the NA region and establishing a bid playbook. During her tenure in this role she successfully managed the restructuring of the entire department during a global reorganisation, delivered strategic bid support for several projects, submitted multiple Construction and Operation Plans, facilitated the setup, as a Board Member of the Responsible Offshore Science Alliance (ROSA), supported and led cross department strategies and significant commercial and joint venture transactions.