How Scotland’s manufacturers will play a key role in the energy transition

Scotland's green energy opportunity

With our unrivalled natural resources, network of renewable energy experts and impressive project pipeline, Scotland is perfectly placed to take a leading role in emerging clean energy markets.

There are multiple opportunity areas within Scotland’s energy transition that manufacturing companies can get involved with – but the real beauty is that a single business can supply more than one of these.

A manufacturing business that specialises in welding, or fabrication and assembly could supply an offshore wind market or hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicle charging stations, for example.

In a way, the market isn’t the key focus, it’s the manufacturing capability the business has – or that it could develop. Scotland is quite unique, in that it is big enough to provide scale, but small enough to provide connectivity.

Key areas of energy transition

Scotland’s key opportunity areas are clean heat, hydrogen, and offshore wind.

Clean heat

With heat currently the single largest source of our emissions, the scale of the clean heat opportunity in Scotland is enormous and presents a huge market opportunity for a wide range of companies.  

Immediate opportunities are likely to be in heat pumps and heat networks due to the New Build Heat Standard (NBHS) from the Scottish Government requiring all new build homes to use a clean heat system. There is huge potential for existing companies operating in heating and construction to move into clean heat. 

At Scottish Enterprise, we have funding available to support businesses with research development and capital support, as well as workforce development.

Hydrogen

Over the next five years, £100 million is set to be pumped into Scotland’s hydrogen industry to achieve the Scottish Government’s hydrogen economy visionopens in a new window.  

While hydrogen is still an early-stage sector, we at Scottish Enterprise believe it has a bright future and want Scottish companies to be actively involved in it. There are currently around 100 hydrogen production projects in Scotland at various scales and stages of development. 

Hydrogen touches on many different areas from production, through storage and distribution, on to various end uses; and we have the key strengths in many other sectors that will also be in the frame, such as the chemical sector, electronics and transport industries and, of course, manufacturing, engineering and fabrication.

Offshore wind

The offshore wind sector has enormous potential and is likely to bring billions of pounds of investment into Scotland, so no matter the size of your company, there will be opportunities for you. Whether you’re a small manufacturing company who can make a bolt, or a large vessel services company providing maintenance capability, whatever your scale, there will be opportunities. 

Our experts have identified five key areas in offshore wind where Scotland can play a key role: secondary steel, anchor and mooring systems, cable protection systems (CPS), cables and accessories and corrosion protection systems.  When we look at these five areas, there is a significant amount of revenue that Scotland could capitalise on, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and innovating and transforming our manufacturing sector.

You can learn more about these opportunity areas in our factsheets. These are full of useful information to give you an insight into the full extent of these market opportunities and help you work out where your business can fit into them.

View the factsheets on the Offshore Wind Scotland websiteopens in a new window