The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Fife company key to £700m wind auction
AFife web consultancy has revealed the crucial role its tech played in the Scotwind auction process.
The list of winners who secured areas of Scotland’s seabed for wind farms were announced on Monday.
A total of 17 projects were chosen around the coast in the first such leasing round in a decade – raising £700 million for the Scottish Government.
Cupar firm Horisk developed the platform used by Crown Estate Scotland (CES) to score the bids for Scotwind.
It was not the case that the highest offer tabled automatically won the lease.
Instead CES needed an online scoring system to allow bids to be compared across a range of metrics, including how likely it was for the bidders to make projects a reality.
Horisk won the bid to develop the platform in December 2020 and finished it in just nine months. The firm said its experience of developing online systems, working with large volumes of complex data and providing workflow tools to manage processes, was key in the project’s success.
CES previously had a complex model to score bids developed using Microsoft Excel.
Director Brian Horisk said: “As a company we are pleased to have played our small part in the Scotwind project. The Evaluation Platform was a significant,
complex project which we needed to deliver in a relatively tight timescale.
“Although the process in itself was unique, we were able to bring our experience of projects with large amounts of complex data to develop a system that was user-friendly, robust and secure.”
CES has used the system to run the bid evaluation
process from September to December last year, enabling the announcement of the successful bidders this week.
Horisk also provided support to the CES team during the evaluation period.
Offshore wind leasing co-ordinator at CES Scott Ross said: “We set Horisk a complicated task and
they were diligent in understanding our requirements and producing a product which exceeded our initial brief.
“They excelled in responding to our requests for additional reporting capabilities with their helpdesk support.
“We are extremely thankful for the experience of working with Horisk.”