Highlands and Moray tipped for floating windfarm jobs boom

The Herald Scotland

6 days ago

He is confident that these will help Cerulean play a pioneering role in the development of an industry that could attract huge inward investment to Scotland and create thousands of valuable jobs.
Floating wind seemed a natural move for Mr Jackson following long stints developing oil and gas structures offshore around world.
After years in which offshore renewables investment focused on turbines fixed to the seabed, he thinks it makes obvious sense to shift to floating developments. These will allow developers to deploy huge turbines in areas where the winds blow more strongly and dependably than in the shallow water areas suitable for fixed developments.
The bigger the turbine and the further offshore it floats, the stronger the winds it can harness.
'There's significantly more wind and higher speeds that blow for longer further offshore,' says Mr Jackson who highlights related environmental benefits of the Aspen development planned by Cerulean.
'The closest we are is 100 miles off the coast of Peterhead,' notes Mr Jackson of Aspen. 'That's well out of the way of most people's eyesight and the environmental impacts are significantly less than brownfield oil and gas.'
Aspen is expected to feature more than 50 turbines when the multi-phase development process is complete. Cerulean hopes the windfarm will be the first of three it will develop off Scotland in the next few years.
Mr Jackson's experience of working on a range of North Sea oil and gas projects reinforces his conviction that Scotland is ideally placed to lead the way in floating wind.
'Scotland has something quite unique: It has phenomenal wind,' he enthuses.
'Where we are far offshore North East Scotland is more than double what it would be in Southern England.'
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Around 90% of the waters off Scotland are deep, which means they should lend themselves well to hosting floating structures.
Mr Jackson also subscribes to the view that the capacities offered by Scotland's oil and gas supply chain provide it with huge advantages.
'Scotland has a fantastic heritage in oil and gas. It effectively became a centre of excellence for the whole world in subsea technology,' he says.
'If Scotland didn't have an oil and gas industry it would have the challenge of how do we build these structures but it has the DNA to do it.'
In Mr Jackson's view there is real potential to develop a major new industry in Scotland on the back of the deployment of floating windfarms. Over the last five years it has become clear that a range of firms are interested in entering the Scottish market.
Dan Jackson, left, with Cerulean Winds co-founder Mark Dixon (Image: Paul Campbell)
Cerulean was awarded leases under the INTOG (Innovation and Targeted Oil & Gas) round completed by Crown Estate Scotland in 2023. The round was intended to encourage the development of renewable energy sources that could be used to power oil and gas activity offshore to help secure a big reduction in emissions related to production operations by 2030.
Output from INTOG developments will also be supplied to the national grid.
Cerulean moved quickly to strike agreements with key contractors that it reckons have the experience and capacity to be able to help it get the windfarms operational by the 2030 deadline.
These include offshore operations and maintenance specialist Bilfinger.
'The engineering's largely done for us,' notes Mr Jackson. 'We want to start cutting steel in 2027 and we want to have units in the water in 28/29.'
A key decision that Cerulean made was to select the Port of Ardersier on the Cromarty Firth to be the onshore support base for operations.
'Ardersier is phenomenal,' says Mr Jackson. 'It's a blank canvas of a scale to be the Scottish floating wind hub.
'You need somewhere to assemble these structures, integrate the turbines and probably most importantly to service them. You need a very large amount of water with a deepwater port and that's what the Port of Ardersier offers.'
'There are alternatives but you don't have the same blank canvas.'
Port of Ardersier is controlled by Haventus, which secured £300 million backing from US private equity business Quantum Capital for a plan to turn the facility into a major low carbon energy industry base. The Scottish and UK Governments have agreed to provide £100m credit.
Mr Jackson thinks the revamped Ardersier will be a major asset that could help to ensure the Scottish supply chain capitalises on the development of floating wind after largely missing out on the benefits of fixed windfarm projects.
The port may help remove obstacles that are holding up some developments.
At the recent All-Energy conference industry leaders noted that the timelines for projects led by firms that were awarded acreage in the landmark ScotWind leasing round in 2022 appeared to have shifted 'to the right'.
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Mr Jackson notes: 'The fixed wind industry went straight to an international solution and that meant Scottish yards and ports could not compete.
'But if you set up Port of Ardersier for assembly, integration and development of floating wind then all the bow wind of projects that are in ScotWind have basically a Scottish solution that's cost competitive with an international solution.'
Mr Jackson expects Cerulean alone to bring in well over £1 billion inward investment on new assembly and port facilities.
'A fixed wind project has negligible UK content during its construction, a bit of storage is probably all … We're aiming for well over 50% UK content, most of which is in Scotland, and we've purposely partnered with companies that want to develop a UK Scottish solution.'
One benefit associated with floating windfarms could have welcome implications for Scotland.
'If you want to service or have an issue with a turbine at the moment you have to hire the world's most expensive crane vessels and use international contractors with international supply chain services… what we will do is we will simply disconnect, tow it to quayside at the Port of Ardersier and service there with a dedicated facility with highly skilled staff supported by the UK supply chain.'
The servicing jobs concerned should be well paid and likely to be created in huge numbers.
'It's a new industry, there's thousands of these jobs, this is a big scale and it's all set for North East Scotland and around the Inverness area.'
Noting that the UK and Scottish Governments recognise the scale of the potential opportunity, Mr Jackson praises both for being very supportive.
Industry leaders have, however, said the UK Government needs to act urgently to allow windfarms to get connected to the national grid more rapidly. The Scottish Government must speed up the planning process.
The success of Cerulean's plans could depend heavily on the outcome of the applications it expects to make for revenue support for projects under the Contracts For Difference programme run by the UK Government.
Another Scottish floating windfarm project on INTOG acreage, Green Volt, won support under the last CFD round. Green Volt is being developed by Flotation Energy with a private equity-backed Norwegian firm.
Flotation managing director Barry MacLeod thinks Green Volt could help pave the way to a surge in developments off Scotland.
If he and Cerulean's Mr Jackon are correct we could see a fair number of Shard-scale turbines floating off Scotland within a few years.