At last, after numerous false dawns, the renewable energy boom is about to generate manufacturing jobs at scale. Not one, but two big plants for making subsea power cables are in Scotland’s planning system.
Sumitomo Electric, part of a Japanese engineering giant with serious pedigree in this sector, has announced it will build one in the Highlands.
It is not yet saying precisely where, what the scale will be, how many jobs will be required, and how much it intends to invest. But all these numbers are likely to be large. Such plants only stack up if they’re on a very big scale.
And it seems that by no coincidence at all, the owner and operator of the Nigg industrial site in Easter Ross, Global Energy, has lodged a detailed plan for precisely that type of factory to be built on 15 hectares of farmland next to the existing fabrication yard.
That’s an area equivalent to 20 football pitches. The buildings would take up nearly half of that, and two of them will be up to 44m (144ft) high – the same height as the spire of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.
Nigg lies within the boundaries of the green freeport designation, won in January by bidders for the Cromarty Firth and Inverness. It means tax breaks for investors, though the details of how the incentives will work are some months off.
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