A leading Scottish entrepreneur has forecast that British firms will lose out on the lion's share of major fabrication work in the early wave of ScotWind contracts.
Sir Ian Wood, the retired chairman of Wood Group, was speaking at the Energy Exports Conference in Aberdeen.
Energy Voice reports that he was asked about the chances of UK suppliers winning the swathe of offshore wind work ahead, or lose out to international firms due to publicly tendered work and capacity constraints.
Sir Ian said the north-east has "taken a bit of time" to shift from oil and gas and get significantly involved in the new offshore wind industry.
"I think there's now a major effort to catch up. In the early days, a lot of the major fabrication infrastructure in the ScotWind round...I can't believe we'll be ready to do more than perhaps take 10, 15, 20% of the heavy stuff that's going to be involved.
"But we absolutely need to speed up as quickly as we possibly can. There's a gap.
"Fortunately, we're not going to need the really significant contracts to be manned up (until) probably about 2024, 2025. So we've got a little bit of time but we're going to have to work really hard to get on top of that."
ScotWind represents a total of 17 huge offshore wind projects in Scottish waters, with multibillion-pound investments.
ScotWind saw seabed space awarded for 25GW of capacity with an estimated Scottish spending commitment of more than £25billion.
Freeport status being allocated to the north-east and the Cromarty Firth will be "extremely important" in finding success in the future, Sir Ian said.
The businessman, chairman of Aberdeen's Energy Transition Zone (ETZ) and economic development body Opportunity North East, pointed to several initiatives underway with the ETZ including a floating wind innovation centre and a green hydrogen test and demonstration facility.
"We're also looking at possible high-value manufacturing. There's cables, electrolysers and so on, quite high-tech ones so that's going to be very important."
The ETZ is planning a supply chain summit in August, attended by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Energy Minister Michael Matheson, with the key focus on maximising and accelerating supply chain involvement.