Adam Bruce: Our chance to evolve renewable energy must be seized

AS A boy I can remember the year that contractors for BP dug a huge trench across our family farm to take a section of the pipeline from the Forties field to Grangemouth.

Another pipeline takes the refined crude oil from Grangemouth to Hound Point, where the tankers load it up

Those pipelines and tankers are part of a network of oil and gas connections that take British hydrocarbons to markets across Europe. The history of the North Sea oil and gas sector has been about domestic consumption and export, and a whole industry has grown up in Scotland to service both markets.

In contrast the UK's electricity sector was built to provide energy to domestic customers only. The interconnector with France is more a balancing mechanism than a device to bring French electrons into British homes. That framework, of domestic production for domestic consumption may be about to evolve to one where trade and interconnection plays a much greater role. Such an evolution could replicate for Scotland the economic benefits brought by the oil and gas sector over the last 40 years.

At the end of July the British government published a document setting out a series of energy pathways to 2050. The work looks at how the country can ensure security of energy supplies while significantly reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from the power sector. A couple of months earlier the European Climate Foundation published its Routemap to 2050 setting out a number of future energy scenarios for the EU, all of which had large amounts of renewable energy generation, and interconnection, at their heart.

In May a group of European companies, with the British, Scottish and Welsh governments, published the Offshore Valuation. This document, read with the two 2050 scenario reports, clearly sets out an energy future for the UK dominated by production of renewable energy in the North Sea.

In 1973 the International Mechanical Engineering Group published a report that set out the oil and gas potential in the North Sea. This year the Offshore Valuation Group revisited that work with a view to estimating the renewable energy "reserves" around the coast of the UK.

The Group found that by 2050 the country could be generating annually the electricity equivalent of 1 billion barrels of oil, with significant opportunities for export. This new offshore industry shares many of the characteristics of the oil sector, not least in the number of jobs that could be created, ports and harbours renewed and retained, and global expertise developed.

To reach a 2050 goal where the UK is exporting significant amounts of renewable energy we need to develop now the networks and trading schemes that will enable customers across the EU to tap into these reserves.

Work is under way at an inter-government level to draw up a regulatory framework, but the British and Scottish governments must take a lead in these negotiations to ensure that the UK derives maximum benefit.

Current large-scale offshore wind developments down the east coast of the UK, which will be built from 2014, need to be plugged into these networks.

The opportunity for the UK is to put the development of marine renewables at the heart of its 2050 energy strategy. Building a new North Sea network to trade clean energy across Europe presents us with a "no regrets" future based on sustainable energy, which will build on the rich heritage of our oil and gas industries. •Adam Bruce is a member of the Offshore Valuation Group and Global Head of Corporate Affairs at Mainstream Renewable Power.