Labour minister: £11bn wind boom creating 1,000 jobs shows Grangemouth mistakes won't be repeated

A Scottish Labour energy minister has insisted getting Britain manufacturing again will hand Scotland the “next generation of jobs” in communities he claimed have been neglected by SNP ministers for almost 20 years.

Michael Shanks also told The Scotsman that Scotland’s two governments working in tandem to ensure industry and jobs are ramped up as fossil fuels decline will prevent another failed just transition, as has happened at the Grangemouth refinery, repeating itself.

Energy Minister Michael Shanks with Cerulean Winds' alliance partners on a tour of the Port of Ardersier near Inverness hearing about the Aspen floating windfarm which will create over 1,000 jobs. | Contributed

Mr Shanks, the Labour MP for Rutherglen, was speaking after Cerulean Winds announced a North Sea floating wind farm will create more than 1,000 jobs and attract a total investment of £10.9 billion across a 50-year lifespan.

Aspen would form one of three connected wind farms planned for the central North Sea, which together would have 300 turbines generating up to three Gigawatts of electricity.

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Ardersier will be the hub for the assembly and delivery of the floating wind farm. About 62 miles from the shore, Aspen would connect to the UK’s onshore grid via Aberdeenshire by 2028 at the earliest.

Speaking to The Scotsman from the Highlands, Mr Shanks branded the announcements “genuinely exciting”, stressing his government’s clean power mission was “delivering jobs on the ground right now”.

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He added: “The scale of the opportunity is remarkable. This is really, in a nutshell, what this clean power mission is all about - about yes, delivering the energy that we need, but with it the industrialisation and the good jobs that go with it.

“The ports really demonstrate where a lot of the industrial opportunity will come. But with it comes really good, well-paid jobs but also apprenticeships as well. So this is delivering the next generation of jobs in communities that haven’t seen enough economic development.”

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Mr Shanks insisted that Scotland’s potential for offshore floating wind was “genuinely an economic growth story alongside an energy security story”.

‘Concerns about the SNP’s 18 years in government’

Asked about the UK government working alongside the Scottish Government, Mr Shanks stressed that in terms of boosting renewable energy, “we have the same outcomes”.

But Mr Shanks warned “there are clearly wider concerns that we have about the SNP’s 18 years in government”, including about “how much they have actually been able to do in driving forward economic growth”.

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“After 18 years, these communities should have been seeing more of the benefits of that and they haven’t”, he said.

“So there’s much more the Scottish Government could do, but in the energy space, we’re working closely with them to unlock investment and also give confidence to the industry that both governments are working together to create a coherent set of policies to drive that economic growth.”

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Pressed over past failures to keep investment and jobs in renewables in Scotland, Mr Shanks said: “For too long, we built renewable energy infrastructure, particularly in offshore wind, in other countries, towed it into British waters and switched it on.

“That isn’t what we want to see as a government. We think industrial policy matters. As a result, we want things to be built in this country again. That does deliver good, well-paid jobs in the Port of Ardersier, right across the north of Scotland and right across the country.

The minister bluntly warned that the closure of the Grangemouth refinery was “an example of what happens when you don’t take seriously the warnings that were loud and clear for governments years ago”.

He warned future plans for the refinery site that will now not be available for decades “could have been done years ago”.

“It’s being done at speed now but it’s an example of what happens when you don’t plan for the transition”, he added.