Clare Lavelle SOWEC co-chair role puts Buchan director at heart of Scotland’s wind push

SOWEC, the Scottish Offshore Wind Energy Council, has appointed Clare Lavelle as its industry co-chair for a two-year term, placing the Clare Lavelle SOWEC co-chair arrangement at the centre of efforts to accelerate Scotland’s offshore wind build-out.

Lavelle will work alongside the government co-chair, Stephen Gethins MSP, Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Energy, and across SOWEC’s working groups. The council said the partnership is intended to support the sustainable growth of the Scottish offshore wind sector. Lavelle will carry out the co-chair duties in addition to her existing position as project director for Buchan Offshore Wind.

Two decades of energy experience behind the Clare Lavelle SOWEC co-chair appointment

The appointment is not a career pivot for Lavelle. According to SOWEC, she brings more than two decades of experience across energy and infrastructure, covering electricity networks, offshore wind, hydrogen and the broader energy transition. That breadth matters at SOWEC, which sits at the intersection of government policy and commercial delivery and needs an industry voice capable of spanning both the technical and strategic dimensions of the sector.

Gethins was direct in his welcome. ‘I am delighted to welcome Clare Lavelle as the new industry co-chair of SOWEC,’ he said. ‘Clare brings a wealth of experience and leadership to the role, and I look forward to working closely with her to support the continued growth of Scotland’s offshore wind sector.’

He also acknowledged her predecessor. ‘I would also like to thank Claire Mack for her commitment and contribution to SOWEC, and for the progress made under her leadership,’ Gethins added.

What SOWEC’s co-chair structure is actually designed to do

The co-chair model, pairing a government minister with an industry figure, reflects SOWEC’s remit as a joint forum rather than a purely regulatory or purely commercial body. The arrangement is meant to give the offshore wind industry a direct line into government decision-making, and to give ministers a credible industry interlocutor who understands the commercial realities of project development.

Whether that structure delivers depends heavily on the individual in the industry seat. Lavelle’s background in project development at Buchan Offshore Wind, combined with her wider infrastructure experience, suggests she is positioned to engage substantively on the supply chain, grid connection and consenting bottlenecks that continue to slow Scottish offshore wind delivery, though SOWEC has not set out a specific agenda for her term.

Scotland’s offshore wind ambitions are considerable. The sector’s growth depends on resolving constraints that run from port infrastructure and grid capacity through to planning timelines and skills pipelines. SOWEC exists, in part, to provide a coordinated forum for working through those constraints with the Scottish Government. The Clare Lavelle SOWEC co-chair appointment is, in that context, an operational choice as much as a symbolic one: the council needs industry leadership with hands-on project experience if it is to move beyond high-level statements of intent.

Lavelle has not yet set out a public programme for her two-year term. The immediate expectation, based on SOWEC’s own framing, is that she will engage with the council’s existing working groups while maintaining her project director responsibilities at Buchan Offshore Wind.