David Canning, appointed Managing Director of Skykon’s new Welcon Towers wind turbine plant at Campbeltown, on the site of the decamped Vestas plant, has been here before. With Vestas.

Canning’s negotiating skills were honed in the mid 1990s in the Ulster loyalist touchstone of Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard. During his time there he developed a parallel system of analysis and training that brought the yard’s welding repair rate down from over 50% to under 0.5% in a year.

The experience was his last in the shipbulding industry however, although the Helensburgh-born welding expert was the son of a welder who worked at the John Brown yard on the Queen Mary and the QE2, said now to be moving from Dubai to Cape Town.

Set on diversification as the solution to an erratic order book and the competitive pricing of yards in the Far East, Harland and Wolff asked Canning to explore the potential for development in wind power, then an emerging technology. This work brought him into contact with Vestas, then about to start operations in a state funded plant at Machrihanish outside  Campbeltown. Canning went there as Technical Support Manager in 2001 and has since also worked in that industry in the United States.

He is now to return to Campbeltown, recruited in what has to be a highly strategic move by Welcon. He is familiar with the industry at an international level, with the birth of turbine tower making in Campbeltown and with Kintyre. Aware of the importance of the Welcon development to an area of high unemployment like this, Canning will be focused on delivering job security through success.

Related Posts

• Kintyre’s Skykon aims to lead UK wind farm manufacturing (1)
• After Campbeltown, Vestas dumps Isle of Wight (0)
• £10 million contract for Campbeltown’s Welcon Towers (1)
• Welcon takeover at Vestas in Campbeltown ‘has the potential to create nearly full employment in the area’ (1)
• Drop-in session for Campbeltown folk to catch up on major developments (2)

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