Danish wind energy giant Vestas kicked off the planning process for a wind turbine blade factory at Leith in Edinburgh earlier this month. The facility would be a major boost for the UK’s efforts to use its burgeoning wind-power sector to kickstart a green industrial revolution.

Leith is part of the Forth Green Freeport, an industrial zone where manufacturers benefit from tax and customs incentives. Freeports have been developed jointly by the UK government and devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland over the past three years.

Many of the 12 freeports selected to date are targeting wind farm developers as they look for investment. 

Developers need large tracts of land close to ports for assembling turbine towers, blades, foundations and other components. There is also an obvious logic to manufacturing components at port locations, given that this reduces the need to transport increasingly massive structures. Vestas’s newest blades are 115 metres long.

A spokesperson for Vestas tells fDi, however, that while it has identified Leith as a potential location for making blades, no investment decision has been made. The company has submitted a Proposal of Application Notice to local authorities in Edinburgh, which the spokesperson described as a “standard precursor” to a planning application.

Winds of change

Wind developers are considering many other ports around Britain as sites for manufacturing.

Freeport East — which includes parts of Suffolk and Essex in eastern England — received planning permission for a ‘green energy hub’ at Bathside Bay in Harwich in May. The freeport’s CEO, Steve Beel, says it is in conversation with “a wide range of manufacturers” from the wind industry around investment at the site.

Mr Beel says Harwich offers a “fairly unique combination”, in terms of water depth, land availability and proximity to a major container port. He argues the port is well positioned to serve the “several gigawatts” of planned developments in nearby waters, and potentially even projects in Dutch and Belgian sectors of the North Sea.

More broadly, Mr Beel believes that freeports — which are an important part of the UK’s ‘levelling-up’ agenda to boost growth outside London — align closely with the opportunities around offshore wind.

“Everything the offshore wind sector has been discussing with government over the past decade or more — around local content, building local skills, working with the universities on innovation and attracting manufacturers to the UK — is actually, in a sense, everything that the freeports have also been set up to do,” he says.

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Britain generates more electricity from offshore wind than any country apart from China. But progress in establishing an industrial base for the sector has been much more modest. 

The proposed Vestas blade facility in Leith would be only the third in Britain, and the country lacks any nacelle or tower manufacturing plants. The Institute for Public Policy Research, a London-based think tank, estimates that the UK missed out on up to €36bn in production value for turbines between 2008 and 2022. 

David Wallace, head of strategic development and policy at the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, a government-funded innovation and research centre, believes Britain can still turn this situation around. “We are at an early phase of growth in the sector,” he says, pointing out that the pipeline of new projects is at least 10 times larger than capacity already deployed.

Mr Wallace notes that freeport incentives are “just one of an array of factors” that can attract manufacturing investment. Another, very significant, ingredient is “policy certainty”. 

The UK’s reputation in this respect took a major dent last year when a licensing round failed to attract any bidders due to the government failing to offer a floor price that would ensure projects were economical. A new round held months later offered a considerably higher guaranteed price in an effort to repair the damage.

The Labour Party, the overwhelming favourite to win next week’s election, certainly has ambitious plans for this sector. It is promising to quadruple offshore wind capacity by 2030, while also doubling onshore wind generation.

It will need to act quickly to convince companies to invest in manufacturing at sites like Leith and Harwich if this bold vision is to become a reality. 

The party has also pledged to allocate £1.8bn from a proposed National Wealth Fund to upgrade the country’s port infrastructure, although its manifesto is silent on the role of freeports, specifically.

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