Twenty new offshore wind projects are intended to be rolled out in the seas around Scotland, 13 of them floating wind, providing a chance for the nation to put clear water between it and the rest of the world as a genuine pioneer in this segment. Billions pledged in investment, a huge leap in the UK’s potential generating capacity and openings galore for the supply chain.
Of course, it just isn’t as simple as that. Rising material costs, infrastructure pinch points and the severe threat of cable and termination failures and downtime spiking insurance premiums are just some of the hurdles to be faced.
But the first of these new projects are now beginning their journey forward, initially through approvals as their criteria are scrutinized. A long road lies ahead before any of them begins delivering the anticipated 27.6 GW of new generating capacity that the ScotWind process intended.
Yet the subsequent consent and approval, and their ultimate success, are so essential to accelerating the likelihood of Scotland meeting its Net Zero emissions goals by 2045 not to mention the UK government’s ambitious target of increasing offshore wind generation five-fold, to 50 GW, by 2030—little more than six years away.
Paving the Way
These projects will play a key role in providing a clean, sustainable power source to millions of Scottish homes and, equally, they have the potential to integrate with, and support, other leading new energy developments, such as green hydrogen hubs, further propelling Scotland’s low carbon ambitions, spurring cutting-edge innovation, creating a multiple of skilled jobs and generating hydrogen for use domestically and for export.
But beyond that they can act as catalysts to major core infrastructure improvements, such as transmission networks and port enhancements, due to the significant private and public investment attracted to the projects and each specific region. This will inevitably have further substantial knock-on benefits for local communities, resulting in additional job creation.
ECG™ control room representation. (Image credit: Proserv)
Proserv is a leading controls technology company and a notable part of the energy supply chain in Scotland and across the world. These burgeoning ScotWind projects are essential not only for wider global ambitions around climate change and energy security, but they represent the lifeblood that accelerates supply chain businesses, such as ours, to harness expertise from oil and gas, forged through the past 60 years, and bring that know-how to the growing clean energies of the future.
Scotland is presently a world leader in offshore wind and ScotWind can open the door to genuinely transformational opportunities to engage the nation’s natural elements, from deep offshore waters to strong winds, to cement and ensure that success moving forwards.
Our Role in Wind
From Proserv’s perspective, this provides the chance to innovate local content, to create jobs and deliver world-leading exportable skills as other regions (from the US to other parts of Europe and East Asia) expand their own ambitions in offshore wind. The UK has more than 200,000 people who earn their livelihood from oil and gas and the evolution of offshore wind offers a natural transition for so many of these workers, safeguarding and transferring their skills and accumulated knowledge. This is just as vital as the new investment and new technologies that these projects will foster.
Among several strategic technology partners, Proserv is working with other members of Scotland’s supply chain, such as a power system monitoring expert and a software engineering specialist, to collaborate on building real-time monitoring and intelligence solutions, including for future use on new and existing wind farms.
A Proserv technician surveys an offshore wind farm. (Image credit: Proserv)
Our efforts have already seen success regarding holistic subsea cable monitoring, for both fixed bottom and floating wind via our ECG™ technology. This shared creative process around innovation is enabling Proserv to pull the respective skill sets of these Scottish small and medium-sized enterprises into wider, global markets that previously would not have been so immediately accessible.
But such technology development, collaboration and creativity are being replicated right across Scotland’s supply chain, within multiple areas of expertise, to enable these future projects to thrive, ultimately generating revenues for investors, operators and the Scottish economy, while providing reliable power generation for decades to come.
It is essential such key sustainable energy projects, opening the way to new jobs, local Scottish content, major regional investment, and crucially representing another step towards eradicating the threats of global warming, are strongly backed, and approved.
This feature appeared in Environment, Coastal & Offshore (ECO) Magazine’s 2024 Spring edition Marine Exploration, to read more access the magazine here.
