The chief executive of Great British Energy has told the BBC that the company is taking on about two people a week at its Aberdeen headquarters, as he defended its job creation record in the city.
Dan McGrail said staff numbers at the headquarters would eventually reach around 300, the BBC reported. He was responding to claims that the publicly owned company’s impact on Aberdeen had been oversold.
The number of jobs GB Energy would bring to the city has been contested since 2024, when chairman Jurgen Maier suggested that 1,000 people might be directly employed there over 20 years, according to the BBC. Last year, after his appointment as chief executive, McGrail clarified that the plan was to recruit about 300 people at the headquarters by 2030.
Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland Breakfast, McGrail said: “The only thing that’s changed since then is that we’re getting on with it.
“We are recruiting about two people a week at the moment.
“What’s the most important thing is how effective those people are when they come on board.”
McGrail said the company had already made three major investments, which he expects to indirectly lead to about 1,500 jobs.
“The thing that we really ought to be measured on… is about the impact that our investments make,” he said.
“We’ve been given a budget to invest in the energy transition and to give a stake to the public in the energy transition.
“We’ve set a target to create 10,000 additional jobs as a result of our activities by 2030.”
King Charles formally opened GB Energy’s offices at Marischal Square on Broad Street on Tuesday. McGrail said the occasion signalled that the company was “open for business”, the BBC reported.
Douglas Lumsden, Scottish Conservative MP for Aberdeen South, said progress was falling “far short of the expectations they created”.
He said, as reported by the BBC: “If it’s only adding two employees a week, it raises serious questions about how the government expects to reach its stated target of 300 staff in any reasonable timeframe.”
GB Energy was set up last year to invest in UK clean energy projects and was one of Labour’s pledges at the 2024 general election. The BBC reported that Labour has promised the company £8.3bn of funding over the current parliament.
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The company’s first investment went into the Pentland Offshore Wind Farm, which a Danish company is building off the Caithness coast. It has also backed a hydrogen manufacturing project in Sheffield and solar panels at schools and NHS sites, most of them in England.
In Scotland, McGrail said the company had been working through the Scottish Government’s Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (Cares), with its funding benefiting 70 local projects.
