Hopes for subsea cable boom in Scotland – BBC News

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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.

A similar factory plan is further down the planning track at another well-established coastal industrial site, and not without its controversies. It has a price tag of roughly £2bn.

At Hunterston, a company called XLCC has planning permission in principle for a very large factory to make very large quantities of DC (direct current) subsea cable for transferring power over long distances.

Its order book starts with an ambitious plan to link England with Morocco, bringing solar and wind power from the north African desert, along the coasts of France and Spain.

The really distinctive element of the Ayrshire plan is a colossally large grey concrete tower. It will be 60m (197ft) by 40m (131ft) in length and breadth, and 185m (607ft) high. That will make it the highest free-standing building in Scotland – the same height as the now demolished chimney at Longannet power station in Fife.

The current highest building in Scotland is the Science Centre tower next to BBC Scotland headquarters, which is merely 127 metres off the Pacific Quayside.

The Hunterston tower will not be a chimney, but a drying tower for cable as plastic coating is applied to it.

To ensure the cable, in section, is precisely round, plastic has to dry evenly around it without gravity leading one side to have better protection than the other.

Cable moves through the factory at approximately one metre per minute. As drying takes three hours, it requires 180m (591ft) of drop. And as there will be six production lines, it needs a lot of bulky tower.

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