Lesley Riddoch: Don't miss the boat on renewables

WOULD the loss of the aircraft carrier contracts to the Clyde and Rosyth mean the death of Scottish shipbuilding? No it wouldn't - and Alex Salmond of all people knows why.

Thousands of offshore wind turbines will soon be installed in the seas off Scotland's east coast. Tens of thousands of miles of cable will bring that energy ashore. There will be endless maintenance. How will that all be delivered - by catapult?

The scale of offshore renewables development around the whole UK is so vast - and work is so imminent - that Scottish yards should be building ships for decades, unless they are too busy, defence-oriented or inefficient to beat off the competition.

The East Anglia offshore wind farm alone will generate up to 7.2GW of energy - enough to power five million homes annually. Construction is due to start in 2015. ScottishPower and Swedish power utility Vattenfall have won development rights, and the Scots plan to spend 4 billion even before construction begins. Plans for new harbours, grid connections, pipelines, cables and turbines are being drawn up right now - and boats are needed to deliver almost everything on that shopping list. That is just one company and one wind farm.

In August, the First Minister met Statoil bosses in Norway to discuss the development of the world's first floating wind farm off the Scottish coast. Statoil's already constructed a full scale prototype anchored ten kilometres off the Norwegian coast - it's been delivering power for a year. The big possibility for deployment is in the seas around Scotland, and once the concept is proved, the sea - if not the sky - may be the limit.

Even in the old energy sector, there are new shipbuilding requirements.

This weekend, Scottish firm Subsea 7 announced a 158 million contract to construct and install miles of service pipelines and underwater structures for a gas development field off Shetland. Will those pipelines float out on their own?

Once tidal and wave energy are ready to join their more mature renewable cousin, wind, there could be almost double the number of offshore deployments. Ships will be needed for access, installation, maintenance and cable laying.

Indeed, marine developers are worried the massive growth in offshore wind will use up all available supplies.One company is redesigning a wave device to be seabed mounted so its static positioning will allow safe co-location with offshore wind - that will cut costs and reduce competition for the limited number of specialist engineers, materials … and purpose-built ships.

Hammerfest Strom -another Norwegian company working with ScottishPower - has designed tidal turbines that should make Islay self-sufficient in energy: work begins in 2015. Already that project has secured jobs for Fife-based BiFab, which has hitherto supplied the North Sea oil industry. Now BiFab will build Hammerfest's first full-scale working prototype device. If it works, hundreds more will be on order.

Why are Nordic firms playing such a leading role in the supply of design talent and intellectual capital when the best natural wind and marine resources lie in the seas around Scotland? Norwegian engineering has been energy, not defence-contract, focused for centuries. While they have been busy exploiting oil, gas, hydro and marine energy - onshore and offshore - we have been busy chasing defence contracts, building nuclear power stations, extracting oil, sticking to what we know and propping up an outdated, conservative and unsustainable industrial-military complex most Scots purport to detest.

The Norwegians built their first hydro-electric dam at the start of the last century. The early and confident expansion of hydro - which now supplies 96 per cent of Norway's energy needs - meant industry located in northern, energy-rich areas which helped keep remote northern Norway populated and well connected.

Compare and contrast with Scotland, whose hydro-electric resource wasn't tapped until the valiant Scottish secretary Tom Johnston forced development through in the 1940s, overriding decades of landowner objections.

If rural development had been dictated by Scotland's national interests and not the penchants of its deer-stalking and sheep-rearing landowning class, we would have exploited hydro earlier and acquired the know-how and confidence the Norwegians possess. Their ability to build hydro dams created skill sets they then deployed on deep-sea oil and gas extraction, carbon capture and now tidal energy. And yet the greatest marine and wind resource lies around Scotland, not Norway.

It's not too late to reorient our outlook and our economy, but the stakes could hardly be higher.

Scottish Enterprise published a comprehensive study of offshore wind's potential impact on the Scottish economy in August. It suggested 50,000 Scots could be employed in offshore wind-related jobs this decade with the right investment in infrastructure, but without it, employment here could be as low as 1,600.

Which scenario will it be? Investment requires confidence, and confidence requires political and social consensus. At present, the consensus is that the centres of engineering and shipbuilding excellence on the Clyde and Forth will be killed off by the loss of defence work.What message does that send about Scotland?

There is one politician who has been smart enough to champion the cause of offshore wind and marine energy; one person who has staked his political reputation on achieving a renewable revolution in his lifetime. And it's the self-same man who is now telling us shipbuilding in Scotland will be over if the aircraft-carrier contract is cancelled on the Clyde.

With an election round the corner and the heart strings of urban voters forever tied to Scotland's once proud reputation for Clyde-built excellence, Alex Salmond may feel he has no choice. He has seen what happened to Green MSP Patrick Harvie for daring to suggest the Clyde had a future beyond war-related employment.

Scottish politicians have created a united front in the hope of forcing George Osborne to back down. If the Chancellor spares the aircraft-carrier contracts, that will give welcome certainty to thousands of skilled Scottish shipyard workers in the short to medium term. It will also provide the sort of portable, non-battle-field based capacity the Tories want for a new defence strategy. But the loss of these contracts will not mean the end of shipbuilding in Scotland. The inability to catch the rising tide on renewable energy most certainly will.