Moray West wind farm connected to grid for the first time – BBC News

The scale of engineering in the biggest turbines now on the market is astonishing. These are turbines designed to withstand the worst of Scotland’s sea and weather conditions so that they can harvest the power of the wind.

The pressures on such big structures are hard to comprehend. The turbines reach higher above sea level than Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. They are twice the height of Scotland’s highest free-standing building, the Glasgow Science Centre Tower.

Ambitions for the offshore wind sector are also colossal. Connecting Moray West is due to be followed by a fast-expanding programme of offshore wind. Ocean Winds has rights to a bigger sea area in the outer Moray Firth that it’s working on, and then it moves on to floating wind turbines.

But having got the engineering right, there are other obstacles.

The industry has been set back in the past two years by the cost of finance going up sharply, and by other cost inflation. Among the bottlenecks in the supply chain is availability of specialist vessels equipped with large cranes to install turbines.

The one shuttling between Moray West and Nigg in Easter Ross, carrying two turbines each time and taking around a week to install them, has to be booked two to three years in advance.

Getting the installation contractors in place follows years of planning and design, as well as securing a guaranteed floor price through an auction process run by the energy regulator Ofgem, and then winning a consent to link into the national power grid.

That grid is constrained by a lack of capacity to get power from the north of Scotland to the central belt and then on to England’s cities and beyond. Only when there is enough cable capacity, on seabed cables and carried by very high new pylons, does the investment in offshore turbines make financial sense.

Developers want to see those who control the grid – SSE, Scottish Power and National Grid plc – win the planning battles with nearby communities to install new high-voltage connections.

They want to see an end to other planning delays, which will require a bigger planner workforce, and to the uncertainty over consents to connect.

Adam Morrison, UK country manager for Ocean Winds and chair of Scottish Renewables, the industry body, argues that offshore wind is seen increasingly as being of strategic importance for the UK, but the auctioning process that has driven down prices has left the finances of such developments “on a knife edge”.

Moray West has gone ahead, but others which were in the same stages of planning, have stalled. So he’s calling for more flexibility to allow for rising input costs.

His colleague and project director Pete Geddes observes: “To meet UK Government targets for offshore wind deployment, it is vital that policy is stable and supportive, to nurture investor confidence, and thereby avoid the risk of market and regulatory shock”.