ScottishPower investing £4m a day as new Glasgow HQ opens

Energy giant ScottishPower has revealed that its daily investment has increased to £4 million through to 2020, totalling about £8 billion, as it looks to 'future-proof' the UK's electricity system.

ScottishPower chairman Ignacio Galan with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at the official opening of the company's new headquarters in Glasgow. Picture: Chris James/ScottishPower/PA Wire

It comes as the business, owned by Spain’s Iberdrola, yesterday officially opened its new headquarters in Glasgow with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

ScottishPower said daily investment has grown from £3.3m in 2013-15 to £4m during the 2016-2020 investment period, adding that power consumption across households and businesses is expected to increase by a third over the next decade as more homes switch to low-carbon electric heating and swap traditional vehicles for electric cars.

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The investment programme is to be led by expert teams based in the new HQ, which brings together 1,650 employees previously spread across separate sites in Scotland, “enabling better collaboration on future technologies”.

The St Vincent Street building, which ScottishPower said is the largest single-use office to be built in Glasgow for 25 years, will also be the firm’s global base for offshore wind, and where experts will work to deliver major projects not only in the UK, but also in the US, Germany and France.

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The company’s chairman Ignacio Galan said the new headquarters will make sure Glasgow “continues to be a centre of engineering excellence and invention”.

He added: “For the first time, we have our expert teams under one roof with a shared purpose to harness low-carbon power and deliver digital transformation. Along with our skilled workforce, our new HQ will also be an exciting hub delivering our planned £8bn investment in new projects across the UK and beyond. Together we will provide the systems that power the future.

“Glasgow has been our home for over 60 years, and we are very pleased to be committing our long-term future to the city. It has a proud engineering heritage, and… we hope that we can help it to play an important role in the digital revolution.”

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Sturgeon said the firm’s new UK headquarters make “a fitting new home for a company that has been a huge asset for Glasgow, and the wider country, for many years”.

She also praised the firm’s ambition, saying it marks “an exemplar to our world-leading energy sector”.

“I wish ScottishPower every success in the future as they help us realise our long-term plan for Scotland’s energy future, which includes a proposal to meet half of our energy needs from renewables by 2030,” Sturgeon added.

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