CWP ENERGY: 25 Years Building Scotland’s Wind
In its 25th year of operation, CWP Energy is celebrating a quarter century of success by looking forward at major opportunities that exist across Scotland. COO Stuart Walker tells Energy Focus that grid reform and clear policy direction will help onshore wind to further boom in a country with so much natural potential.
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Interview with Stuart Walker, COO
Drive through Dumfries and Galloway or East Ayrshire and the evidence of Scotland’s onshore wind story is hard to miss, ridge after ridge of turbines turning steadily across some of the richest wind resource in Europe. Much of that landscape has been shaped by one company. CWP Energy has spent 25 years developing onshore wind across southern Scotland, building a portfolio that now exceeds 1GW and represents more than £1 billion of UK investment, and it is not slowing down.
Founded in 2001 and still run as a family business today, CWP Energy has developed, constructed and connected nine operational windfarms, including Sanquhar, Dalry, Aikengall and Aikengall II, Millour Hill and its extension, Sneddon Law and Calder Water, each one now feeding clean power into the grid and funding into the communities around it. In recent years the company has diversified into solar, battery storage and green hydrogen, broadening a business built on one clear proposition as Chief Operations Officer Stuart Walker describes: “We are an end-to-end onshore renewable developer, established and built as a family business, and remaining so today. We have grown through pure organic expansion, refinancing a project to build the next after successful consent.”
That pattern, he explains, has tracked government policy closely from the start. “Over the years, we embraced the Renewables Obligation Certificate scheme (ROCs). When that ended, we pivoted into solar and BESS developments looking to integrate into existing sites or new projects while remaining a leader in onshore wind with a steady pipeline.”
STEADY GROWTH
What sets CWP Energy apart, Walker says, is what happens after a project is consented. Unlike larger conglomerates that often sell projects on, CWP Energy keeps hold of everything it builds. “That is our USP – we retain all of the projects that we develop. We operate any consented projects, and, in terms of stakeholder engagement and relationships, that is a real positive. It means stakeholders are dealing with the same people throughout the option period for planning, right through to operations. Some of our sites are now coming up to 20 years old and we have been working with the same stakeholders since day one.” That continuity, he argues, is precisely what larger competitors lack. “That operational model seems to be where we have a point of difference with the slightly bigger conglomerates who have lesser relationships with local communities and landowners because the approach is more transactional and remote.”
25 years in, the company is entering its most significant phase yet. A new site under construction will almost double its operational capacity, with revenue expected to follow a similar trajectory over the next year or two, helped by Contracts for Difference protection secured for the project. But growth on that scale brings its own pressure. “We have a relatively small and lean team, and we face the challenge of having expanded very quickly. We are at a pivotal point where we probably need to recruit new people, but finding the right people in the industry is a challenge,” says Walker.
He credits the company’s grounded, locally embedded approach for such consistency in trajectory. “By building and establishing a base of not only commercial investment but community engagement, landholder engagement, and relationships with local authorities and statutory consultees has seen us well over the years. The result is that we have seen a good linear growth path over the last 25 years and that is positive for a small business.”
SANQUHAR II PROGRESS
That new site is Sanquhar II, and it is no small addition. An extension to the company’s existing Sanquhar windfarm, operational since 2018, the new project will become the fourth largest onshore windfarm in the UK, comprising 44 turbines on Vestas’ Enventus platform, featuring the V162 turbine, the first of its kind installed in Scotland.
Construction has moved quickly through 2026. In March, the first tower sections completed their journey from King George V Docks in Glasgow to the site, and by June the project reached a UK first, with two turbine blades transported simultaneously in convoy using blade lifter technology. Walker called it a landmark moment for the wider sector. “Delivering two blades simultaneously using blade lifters represents a significant logistical achievement and showcases the innovation being applied across the wind industry to safely transport increasingly large turbine components.”
Once operational, Sanquhar II will generate enough electricity for 335,000 homes, representing an investment of roughly £400 million into the UK economy. The impact on the ground is already visible. More than 300 employees have worked on site at peak construction, a substantial figure for a corner of southwest Scotland with historically low employment and limited capacity for investment. CWP Energy has leaned into that opportunity deliberately, working with national contractors on civils and electrical work while pushing local firms into the supply chain wherever possible. On Sanquhar, enabling works were carried out by local companies Duncan Plant Hire and JPS Utilities.
“For construction, we are using Jones Bros – a family-owned company based out of North Wales – they are the principal contractor carrying out the civils works and are an excellent partner. We really push to try and support local supply and contractors, and within our key contracts we subcontract smaller local companies from within 10-15 miles of the site. These subcontracts that are given out are the biggest monetary contracts that some of these companies will ever deal with, and that is something we are proud of,” explains Walker.
Not every gap can be filled locally. As the first project in the UK to deploy this generation of Vestas turbine, Sanquhar II has exposed a skills shortfall the wider industry will need to address.
“On the turbine side, because it is the first time a turbine of this kind has been deployed and used in the UK, there are little to no skilled staff in the UK for us to use.” Walker details. The scale of the challenge is troubling for an industry central to the success of the energy transition. “It is easy to say we are going to create thousands of jobs next year, but what are they? We have to identify those jobs specifically and then ensure there is supply to fill them,” he says, pointing to competition from a resurgent North Sea oil and gas sector as well as offshore wind, which can offer higher renumeration, as a further complication for retaining talent in renewables.
WORKING WITH GOVERNMENT
Delivering projects of this scale within a decade rather than two takes more than construction expertise, it also depends on policy keeping pace with ambition, and Walker is focused on where closer alignment could unlock faster progress. “When we see technological changes or regulatory changes in the form of support for energy markets, the lag time between announcing that support and having policy that delivers means that developers can miss out on market opportunities. The energy markets are truly global and there are other countries that are a little more agile and can move quicker,” he says.
Sanquhar II took the best part of 10 years from inception to grid connection, and Walker sees real value in shortening that runway. “If you look at the technology and political changes in that period, it makes decision making more risky than it should be.”
That same collaborative instinct is guiding CWP Energy’s approach at Eskdalemuir, home to its next major project. The region could unlock up to 6GW of onshore wind capacity, enough to power around three million homes and attract up to £10 billion in private investment while supporting 8,500 jobs, though development has been carefully managed for almost two decades to protect a Ministry of Defence seismic monitoring array in the area. CWP Energy has a 500MW site there, fully grid connected, and is working through the process required to bring the two priorities together.
“There is very good natural capital in the form of wind and landscape but you also have a government department involved which is high-priority, and we want access to that conversation, to ensure the public and private sector wishes are best heard,” Walker says. He is optimistic that a way through exists. “We think there is a huge opportunity for the government to remove the blockers quickly, and we see it happening elsewhere with immediate action on other priorities. Our focus is to try and make sure the government helps to maximise the energy market for the UK.”
POWERING DATA CENTRES
Solving that puzzle matters beyond Eskdalemuir alone, because Walker sees the region, and sites like it, as central to where the next phase of CWP Energy’s growth will come from. Scotland’s transmission network was built around centralised coal and gas plants, not the dispersed wind resource that now exists, and Walker believes the answer lies in bringing demand to where the power already is.
“There is now a huge potential over production in Scotland where the natural capital is great as we have good wind and supporting planning and politics to an extent, and what is missing is the ability to harness that while opening new markets such as data centres,” he says. “We would like to link up with other businesses in this space to maximise the output from our existing sites and future sites so that we can alleviate constraints.”
The scale of the opportunity, he says, should not be underestimated. “The explosion of AI has been outrageous in the past 18 months. We are well versed in the first stage, which is making the power. It’s now about the next stage, what we are going to do with it. This should be seen as a huge growth opportunity for Scotland providing cheap, secure green power for the next technological advances.”
None of that ambition works without the two relationships Walker keeps returning to throughout the conversation, community and government. CWP Energy has now delivered £11 million in community funding since 2001, supporting local infrastructure, education and skills programmes across the areas it operates in, and recent analysis suggests up to £500 million could flow into Scottish communities from renewables over the next decade. For a company built on staying with its projects for decades rather than passing them on, that long-term local relationship is a foundation the business is built on.
What Walker wants from government, in turn, is simple, consistent policy that matches the pace of the industry it champions. Getting that right would let CWP Energy do what it has spent 25 years doing, building steadily, employing locally and keeping faith with the communities hosting its turbines, while finally being able to move at the speed the technology, and the country’s energy needs, now demand.