Episode 68: Deepwater and Floating Offshore Wind with Scottish Renewables

As our listeners will know, I am also ex oil and gas.

I used to be a geologist, so I'm all about the resources.

So Angela, when you say it's such a huge opportunity for Scotland, it's one of the things which I'm 100% on board with.

I see the opportunity for clean energy, for renewable energy in Scotland.

The, the resource that you have, that we have offshore is just, it's just huge.

Jason mentioned there the economic opportunity as well.

What does that mean though? Because obviously you've got the, well, energy generation, you've got offshore wind.

That's for the whole of the, the UK.

But for Scotland specifically, what does economic opportunity look like from this? And Angela, I'm looking at you for that one.

Could you just explain to our listeners what that would be, and what does that mean?

So what it means is Scottish companies being able to participate in the supply chain, and it means investment in Scottish infrastructure, in a nutshell.

But what we need, if that's gonna happen, is for everyone to have clarity about what the development pipeline looks like.

There's a virtual circle here.

As developers get more confident about what their development pathway looks like, then they can make meaningful investments and place orders in the Scottish supply chain and in Scottish infrastructure.

You know, developers in Scotland really want to do what they can to support manufacturing capability and the development of infrastructure.

It's the right thing to do, and it can also help with their own project development certainty and help them to bring costs down.

So what we want to develop here is a virtuous circle where developers have got good visibility about pipeline of projects.

They've got certainty around the timeline for developing their projects.

That gives them the confidence then to go out to companies in the Scottish supply chain and to the infrastructure providers that they need And place contracts there which can then support growth and jobs across Scotland.

That's what we want to see in the sector.

That's exactly right.

But part of the challenge here is there's a difference between projects having their clear timelines and the developers actually being really clear on what they're going to be building.

And I think this is part of the challenge that we might start digging into when we're talking about deep water, hybrid systems, floating systems.

The supply chain needs to know how big are these turbines going to be, how are they going to be attached to the seabed, do we go down the mooring line routes, and all this kind of thing.

Is there anything, Emily, that we wanted to follow up on on that?