Photo by Rob Webbon 

Plans to manufacture floating offshore wind foundations at the Port of Ardersier in the Highlands have taken a step forward after Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) approved more than £778,000 in Scottish Government funding for an 18-month front-end engineering design study. The money, secured with support from Scottish Enterprise’s international arm, will fund work led by the French developer BW Ideol, which plans to build a dedicated facility at Ardersier for the serial production of its Damping Pool concrete floating foundations. 

The proposed facility is designed to produce one foundation every 12 days from a single line, equivalent to roughly 500MW of annual capacity, and could ultimately support around 1,200 direct jobs in the Highlands. BW Ideol’s Damping Pool design has already been selected as the preferred foundation for the 1GW Buchan Offshore Wind project, in which the company holds a 33 per cent stake alongside BayWa r.e. and Elicio, and which secured its onshore consent shortly before the funding announcement. 

Energy Minister Stephen Gethins said the facility “has the potential to generate over a thousand new well-paid, skilled jobs.” HIE chief executive Stuart Black described the project as a critical step towards establishing large-scale floating wind manufacturing in the region. Offshore Wind reported that BW Ideol strengthened its commitment to Ardersier through a partnership agreement first signed in 2021, securing exclusive access to the site for concrete foundations. 

Part of a wider industrial push 

The Ardersier investment sits within a broader push to anchor floating wind manufacturing in Scotland rather than import foundations from abroad. Buchan project director Clare Lavelle told the Scotsman that “the next couple of years are very critical” for delivering the project, which has committed around £200m to manufacturing foundations at Ardersier using concrete supplied by Holcim from its Glensanda quarry on the Argyll coast, a move intended to shorten and secure the supply chain. The wider Buchan project is expected to support around 1,300 jobs by 2031 and up to 2,900 once fully built.