One of Scotland’s most powerful offshore wind farms has been connected to the grid for the first time and is on track to produce enough electricity to power half of Scotland’s homes.
Moray West is located 14 miles from Helmsdale in Sutherland and 31 miles north of Buckie.
Nearly a third of the 60 turbines have been installed, as well as all the platforms on which the turbines stand.
The total project will cost £2.5 billion. Ocean Winds, the developer, is based in Madrid and is co-owned by Portuguese and French energy companies.
The electricity cable comes ashore at Sandend, near Portsoy in Aberdeenshire.
The gas is buried 27km underground to a newly built substation near Keith. Moray West then supplies electricity to the national grid via the nearby Blackhillock substation.
Engie, one of the parent companies, helped secure the financing. They had a contract with Amazon and Google to supply the energy they needed for their operations, including data centers.
The project involves the largest turbines yet installed in British waters, each operating at a height of 257 metres (843 feet) above sea level.
Turbines 17 and 18 are being installed this week, while assembly of the steel towers, which are 120 m (393 ft) tall, continues at the Nigg Quayside facility in Easter Ross. The 700-tonne gearbox, or nacelle, sits atop the tower.
The three blades of each turbine are 108 ms (354 ft) long and are shipped from the Siemens-Gamesa factory in Hull to the Easter Ross assembly plant.
The turbine towers are mounted on monopiles, or single steel tubes. These were made by Smulders Projects in Wallsend, North Tyneside, and are sunk 30 metres into the seabed, rising 60 metres to the surface of the North Sea.
Another key part of the project is the seabed cables that connect the turbines to each other and to the Moray coast, which were made in Hartlepool by JDR.
Ocean Winds has published an analysis of the economic impact on Scotland and the UK economy. According to the analysis, there are over 80 suppliers active in construction and installation in the UK.
Project developers like Ocean Winds are under pressure from governments and regulators to improve their supply chain sourcing closer to home.
Moray East wind farm, in an offshore area adjacent to Moray West, is estimated to have brought 6,000 job years and £550 million in added value to the UK. Moray West is on course to achieve similar figures.
However, once the wind farm is up and running, there will only be 70 maintenance jobs at Moray West, based in Buckie, with operations monitored from Glasgow.
The same number of employees are working from Fraserburgh to maintain the Moray East wind farm, which is already operational.
Moray East has 100 turbines with a capacity of 9.5 MW, while the newer designs being installed at Moray West have a capacity of 14.7 MW. The newer layout therefore produces a similar amount of power with 40% fewer turbines to be installed.
The scale of engineering in the largest turbines now on the market is astonishing. These turbines are designed to withstand Scotland’s worst sea and weather conditions so they can harvest the power of the wind.
The pressure on such large structures is hard to comprehend. The turbines rise higher above sea level than Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. They are twice as tall as Scotland’s tallest freestanding building, the Glasgow Science Centre Tower.
The ambitions for the offshore wind sector are also colossal. The Moray West connection is to be followed by a rapidly expanding programme of offshore wind. Ocean Winds has rights to a larger area of sea in the outer Moray Firth which it is working on, and then it will move on to floating wind turbines.
But even if the technology is good, there are other obstacles.
The industry has been facing a downturn in the past two years due to soaring financing costs and other cost inflation. One of the bottlenecks in the supply chain is the availability of specialized vessels equipped with large cranes to install turbines.
The turbine that runs between Moray West and Nigg in Easter Ross carries two turbines at a time and takes around a week to install. This turbine has to be booked two to three years in advance.
Finding the installation companies involved years of planning and design, securing a guaranteed minimum price through an auction process organised by energy regulator Ofgem, and gaining permission to connect the installations to the national grid.
That grid is constrained by a lack of capacity to get power from the north of Scotland to the central belt and then on to the cities of England and beyond. Only if there is sufficient cable capacity, on seabed cables and supported by very tall new pylons, will the investment in offshore turbines make financial sense.
Developers want the grid operators (SSE, Scottish Power and National Grid plc) to win the battle with nearby communities over the construction of new high-voltage connections.
They want an end to other planning delays, which require a larger number of planners, and uncertainty over connection approvals.
Adam Morrison, UK country manager for Ocean Winds and chairman of Scottish Renewables, the industry body, said offshore wind was increasingly seen as strategically important for the UK but the auction process, which has driven down prices, had put the finances of such developments “on a knife edge”.
Moray West has continued, but others at the same planning stage have stalled, so he calls for more flexibility to take account of rising input costs.
His colleague and project leader Pete Geddes comments: “To meet the UK government’s targets for offshore wind deployment, it is vital that policies are stable and supportive, to fuel investor confidence and thus avoid the risk of market and regulatory shocks.”