This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

“Wouldn't it be good,” the CEO of the Inverness & Cromarty Firth Green Freeport, told me recently, “if, 30 or 40 years from now, we can say that we've managed to actually take the value from the offshore wind industry, not just at the point of generation, but in everything else that went before it - manufacturing, fabrication, logistics, infrastructure and so on - and built an ecosystem onshore supporting local jobs, skills and economies?"

There it is: the clean energy dream. Few of us would disagree with that.

But so many of the stories around green jobs and the north of Scotland suggest that the dream has not yet arrived. Oil and gas may be shedding workers, but the renewables job rush hasn’t quite happened. The question is whether it is on its way.

Days are still early for the Green Freeport. It was only at the end of September that the memorandum of understanding was signed off by the Secretary of State for Scotland, Deputy First Minister, local council leader, and the Inverness and Cromarty Firth freeport board, releasing £25 million of UK Government seed funding.

“I know it feels,” said freeport CEO, Calum MacPherson, “like we've been doing this a long time, but in some ways, our journey has just begun.

“In terms of sustainability and the community's ability to absorb it, we don't want this to be a sharp, short, sharp shock of thousands and thousands of jobs landing. A steady growth would be what everyone wants with a very, very long tail, hopefully generations, instead of a boom and........

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