With the accelerating shift away from fossil fuels, Scotland is rapidly transitioning from these fuels to more sustainable solutions. We have huge opportunities for Scottish companies and international investors, particularly in offshore wind and large scale hydrogen production to help the hard to abate areas of the economy such as heat and transport.
Scotland is already a world leader in floating wind but we are also leading the world in the decarbonisation of offshore oil and gas assets with plans to electrify North Sea production energy with floating offshore wind.
Our two offshore wind wind supply chain clusters, DeepWind and Forth and Tay Offshore, can support companies to access this huge market in Scotland. The Scottish Government's three enterprise agencies, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Scottish Enterprise and South of Scotland Enterprise, have a number of support mechanisms and can also assist inward investment in partnership with our international trade and investment agency, Scottish Development International (SDI).
By choosing Scotland you’ll be supported and guided by our world-leading climate change targets which demonstrate our commitment to a net zero future.
We’ve already made great strides in our transition away from fossil fuels. In 2020, an estimated 97.4% of Scotland's gross electricity consumption came from renewables.
In addition, the UK’s Energy Security Strategy aims to deliver 50GW of offshore wind in the UK by 2030 by running annual Contracts for Difference auctions (the UK’s mechanism for supporting low carbon generation) from 2023.
Boasting one of Europe’s largest offshore Renewable Energy Zones, outlined in blue on the Marine Scotland National Marine Plan Interactive (NMPI) online map tool on the left, Scotland is the natural location for your offshore wind project.
To help put this into perspective, if you take the four countries that signed the recent Esbjerg Offshore Wind Declaration i.e. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, in which they pledged to deliver 150GW of offshore wind by 2050 then Scotland's REZ is larger than all four nations offshore areas put together.
Therefore, although Scotland has been slow to exploit this huge offshore wind resource we are now picking up the pace of development with almost 4 gigawatt (GW) already operational or under construction and up to 6GW in the pipeline, and we’re ensuring this huge market continues to boom.
The recent ScotWind Leasing Round awarded an additional 30GW of offshore wind with the aim of delivering the bulk of this capacity by 2032. Over 64% of this capacity is floating wind and the whole round did not exceed the targeted 8,600sq km allocated for this round. This is out of a REZ which consists of over 300,000sq km and illustrates the huge potential for future offshore wind in Scottish waters. It is also one of the reasons why Scotland will be a future large scale producer and exporter of green hydrogen to the rest of the UK and to Northern Europe.
We also launched the INTOG (Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas) leasing round in August 2022 and this aims to deliver up to 5.4GW of electrification of oil and gas facilities in the North Sea by 2030 by using floating wind technologies.
As a world top ten offshore wind market, Scotland’s enormous 40GW plus project pipeline will create opportunities for:
Discover all Scotland has to offer for Offshore Wind investors and the clusters that support our industry.
The Forth & Tay Offshore Wind cluster operate in the east of Scotland developing the supply chain and workforce.
The DeepWind supply chain cluster is now the largest offshore wind representative body in Scotland with over 820 members drawn from industry, academia and the public sector.
The Scottish offshore wind market is now one of the largest in the world and currently leads on the development of commercial floating wind with 15GW of in the pipeline
Scotland is at the forefront of the 5th Industrial Revolution.Paul O'Brien, Senior Development Manager, DeepWind Cluster Expert, Highlands and Islands Enterprise
