This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter

Last week saw Scottish Renewables host its annual Offshore Wind Conference, and though I didn’t manage to make it to the exhibition, I did drop in on the industry’s Burns Supper for some networking chat.

There was a phrase that stood out to me in many of the conversations; the words “not enough”.

Not enough vessels, not enough port capacity, not enough grid, not enough connections, not enough welders. It seemed to me that there was not enough of everything but wind.

That ‘not enough’ is a reminder that the success of ScotWind is by no means set, in spite of all the excitement. Many challenges exist to it delivering its planned 29.6GW of power, and the industry seems at once in a state of both starry-eyed optimism and precarity.

This week, therefore, I thought I would focus my newsletter on some of those not enoughs, and what is being done, or could be done, to tackle them - particularly those strategies announced at the conference itself. What progress is being made on the shortages?

There aren’t enough vessels to install all these offshore wind projects - and this lack is not just a UK problem but a global one, raised in the media many times in recent years. Last year, Bloomberg published a story which stated that with "turbines approaching the size of the Chrysler Building, there’s a looming shortage of ships large enough to install them”.

One proposal, made last year by the Institute of Public Policy Research is that Britain should create a state-owned installation vessel fleet.

The world, as renewables are scaled up, is facing a cable supply challenge. One estimate by Visiongain market research, had it that about 2.5 million kilometers of subsea cables will be required globally by 2030. Meanwhile, according to a recent report by Bloomberg NEF, for every pound the UK has spent on renewables it has spent only 25p on cables and power lines.

Thankfully, in recent times there has been significant progress on subsea cable, with the big news last May that Sumitomo had broken ground on construction of a £350 million facility to manufacture such cable at Nigg.

An announcement........

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