Thyboron Harbour :
"We are ideally located in relation to future wind farms"

45-year-old Kjartan Ross joined Thyborøn Port's director in June with solid maritime experience, which comes from his time as a ship's officer at Mærsk and MAN Diesel Turbo. At the latter in Frederikshavn, he worked as head of a department that retrofitted existing ships to reduce fuel consumption by up to 31 percent.

However, he also has direct experience of port management from the Port of Aalborg, where he has been sales and marketing manager since 2018. In Aalborg, he built up his own department and worked on implementing internationalization.

Although everything may indicate that Kjartan Ross grew up in a port city, he actually comes from Grindsted. But his father worked building power plants, so he grew up around the world. Kjartan Ross has therefore already lived in exciting places around the world during his upbringing, for example in Macau, from where he fondly remembers going to school where there were canes.

Now he has landed in Thyborøn, from where the working week takes place, while the weekend is spent at home in Aalborg. But this now means that there is more time to work during the week. Both ambitions and visions for the port are also quite clear.

- What a port makes its money on is hinterland. Here we have the advantage of being an east-facing port on the West Coast. This means that we can build a port more cheaply than other ports, because we don't have to build large piers, says Kjartan Ross and concludes:

- It is a crazy exciting port. We are ideally located in relation to future wind farms.

He is well aware of the rumors swirling in the port world about cooperation between individual ports. But that is not something that is being invested in.

- We want to have control over what happens in our port, he states.

The need for more port capacity for offshore wind

Especially in relation to the green transition and offshore wind, some forecasts predict that there will be a need for increased port capacity.

- If we are to maintain the leading position that we have today in Denmark, port facilities are needed. The ports must be developed, and perhaps some ports should receive support for that development, explains Kjartan Ross.

He also sees a number of ports as particularly suitable for offshore wind.

- There are a number of ports that are particularly suitable like ours in addition to Esbjerg, Rønne, Odense, Aalborg, Nakskov and Aabenraa. That's why Thyborøn must get on the field, says the port director and reports on the king discipline within offshore wind:

- We are also looking at the possibility of shipping offshore wind.

The expansion of offshore wind in the world is only going one way with the green transition and increasingly larger turbine elements. This also makes transporting the parts more and more difficult on the roads.

- At some point, there will be more production facilities at a port, because the parts are getting so large. That would be interesting for us, because otherwise the production would move abroad. With production, turbine parts would come across the quay. That's something that we have potential for here, and it's a development opportunity for us, says Kjartan Ross.

That would also have an impact on the entire municipality.

- It would create a lot of jobs. That was one of the reasons I applied for the position, because the local angle makes it positive.

Train to the quayside

There is also another vision that makes a lot of sense. Today, there are already freight train tracks to Cheminova, which is located south of Thyborøn. And the port's development potential goes in the same direction.

- It's a matter of a few kilometers that could give us a freight terminal. We could become a transport hub for goods to Norway, says Kjartan Ross about another development opportunity for the port.