Scotland is seeing the start of re-industrialisation on a scale not witnessed since the oil boom of the 1970s

Now, she uses the same engineering skills at two wind farms in the Moray Firth operated by Ocean Winds, an offshore wind developer jointly owned by Portugal’s EDP Renewables and Engie of France.

“Being able to lead a sustainable life has always been my dream and is what drove me towards the renewables sector,” Lakshmanan said this week at the launch of a pilot funded by the UK government to help current and former oil and gas workers in the Aberdeen area switch to jobs in clean energy.

Successful applicants to the scheme, designed by the Scottish government and delivered by Skills Development Scotland, will receive funding for training courses to get work in offshore wind, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage. Yet as far as Reform UK is concerned, it appears young people like Aishawarya shouldn’t have the option of working in offshore wind. Last week, the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice sent a tersely-worded letter to the heads of offshore wind developers in the UK putting them on notice that, if elected in 2029, the party would “strike down” all contracts signed under the next government auction that allocates the price at which developers sell power to the grid, known as AR7.

This could spell an end to Scotland’s huge pipeline of offshore wind projects, most of which is set to come from vast wind farms in the North Sea in ScotWind, under which Crown Estate Scotland (CES) granted options for wind farm leases that started in 2022.

Reform’s plan would also slam into reverse years of investment in a key piece of the UK’s renewable energy jigsaw. Wind and solar were in the past year the largest source of power in the UK on about 38 per cent, followed by gas (30 per cent) and nuclear (14 per cent), according to the National Grid.

The number of people employed in offshore wind has risen by 24 per cent from two years ago to 40,000 today, according to report last month by the Offshore Wind Industry Council and RenewableUK, a trade association.

Tice’s immediate target is Clean Power 2030, a policy laid out last year by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband that aims to see 95 per cent of the UK’s power generated by renewables. To say it is ambitious would be an understatement. But Miliband insists it’s needed to effect a “once in the once-in-a-generation upgrade of our energy infrastructure” to cope with rising industrial demand for electricity, decarbonisation of transport, and reducing reliance on expensive foreign gas. Much of this will involve generating 45-50 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind, of which the bulk (30GW) would come from ScotWind.

Tice insists this is all a manifesto for “industrial decline”. Yet in Scotland, we already see the start of re-industrialisation on a scale not witnessed since the oil boom of the 1970s. At Nigg, Sumitomo Electric of Japan is building a £350 million factory to make the subsea cables needed to connect wind farms to the grid. Ports around the Cromarty Firth were recently grouped together for offshore wind supply chain manufacturing and assembly to create the Inverness & Cromarty Firth Green Freeport – the largest green engineering development area in the UK. Anyone who has visited Royal Yacht Britannia in Edinburgh recently will have noticed the cranes and refurbished docks across the water at Port of Leith, evidence of a transformation allowing it to handle the vessels that ship assembled wind turbines out to sea.

Instead, Tice’s party wants more licences to drill for oil in the North Sea – a call that may be reinforced by US president Donald Trump when he meets Sir Kier Starmer in Aberdeen. Yet this ignores the fact that the North Sea basin is in decline and any new licences to drill will make little difference to oil production.

“[Operators] won’t discover very much because the acreage has been in the hands of numerous operators over decades and they already know what’s there,” explains Gail Anderson, research director at Wood Mackenzie.

Trump may also repeat his opposition to offshore “windmills”, new development of which he torpedoed early in his presidency in the US, sending a chill across the industry. That adds to inflationary and regulatory headwinds that are giving some ScotWind developers pause as they factor in mounting costs. CES recently concluded a consultation on extending the ScotWind options to give developers more time to make the numbers work.

Some developers, including those behind a wind farm called Ossian, backed by Marubeni of Japan, SSE Renewables and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, have recommended extending.

All eyes are now on the nitty-gritty of AR7. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero this week published guidance on the maximum price the government would pay developers in the upcoming auction to compensate them for project risks.

It was set at a level that indicates the over-arching imperative of lowering consumer bills could be harder, not easier. This is where the Labour government’s Achilles Heel lies – and where Reform has an opening.

Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. But the time it will take for this to filter through to the public risks being longer than Miliband’s 2030 target. A new narrative is required.