Infrastructure

More windfarm components

Windfarm jackets, from Wardie Bay. The seven jackets are on the Xin Hao Yua

Early in the year the semi-subs arriving started to have a mixture of transition pieces and these jackets, which are used instead of the monopiles in the previous post for deeper water.

They are much the biggest things to have arrived in Edinburgh in one piece. The thing at the left of the image is the bow of the cargo ship.

For a hint of the scale of these things, there’s a person in a high vis jacket just to the left of the red vehicle, with his head concealed by the metal framing; this metal is welded to the deck for shipping and cut off before the things are moved. The grey thing along to the left is one of the 10 axle dollies which are inserted under the feet to roll them along the dock.

The big yellow things make a new feature on the skyline; they tend to pop up behind buildings when you didn’t think that was where the dock was..

Inchcape windfarm has many better pictures and an explanation here

Edinburgh, Infrastructure

Building a windfarm

There’s not been much public blogging lately because I’ve been posting the quantum notes in private, for the project which I’m supporting to spinout from Heriot Watt university.

There’s a different big infrastructure project going on, and we have a way to get pictures of some of the components that it takes to build.

We’d watched the Xiang Tai Kou backing in to the deep water dock at Leith on the evening of 11 October 2025, trying to see from 2 miles up town (with binoculars) what she was carrying. Eight huge cylinders .. monopiles for the Inch Cape windfarm. For scale, the Targe Guillemot holding position in front of it is 25m long. The big ship is 231m long and 46m wide.

This was the first arrival of a procession of these Chinese flagged heavy deck cargo vessels, last port Suez. It was preceeded by months of dredging, in the channels on the Forth as well as in the entry to the main Leith dock behind the lock.

That operation also had at least three tugs involved, the GPS Avenger, Union Onyx and Union Topaz, moving and shepherding the big hulls being used for the material dredged up.

Sheng Chang 777 on the 23rd October 2025

The next ship in was the Sheng Chang; this image has people underneath the monopiles.

Wei Xiao Tian Shi on the 31st October 2025

This was the third ship in; there were 8 bogies with 10 axles each underneath the cylinders.

Heavy lift vessel Les Alizés, 23 December 2025

This is the start of the next stage, where the heavy lift vessel loaded on 5 of the monopiles and went off to set them in place at the windfarm, which is more or less due East of Dundee.

Inch Cape wind farm is offshore Montrose, connected to Cockenzie by subsea cable. The lift ship, made in China, is owned by a Belgian company, Jan de Nul, headquartered in Luxembourg.

Infrastructure, quantum, Travel

Weeknotes 6

North Queensferry and the Forth bridges from the train on the railway bridge.

There wasn’t so much quantum technology this week, and more administration. The concept of distributed infrastructure had to be explained to some of the audience using familiar consumer experiences.

There was a useful note about the NQCC quantum computing testbeds https://www.eetimes.com/u-k-startup-scaling-quantum-computing-with-photonics/

Aegiq is one of two companies on the NQCC campus utilizing silicon photonics to deliver a full stack quantum computing platform.

Infrastructure, quantum

Weeknotes 5

Quantum hasn’t yet got to the point where I can say, like I did with Cisco routers long ago “I know where the bits come from and go to underneath that piece of road digging”, though there have been SQUIDs (superconducting quantum interference devices) in use as very sensitive magnetometers for a long time. SQUID sensors market trends

Packaging and photonics links

Lasers https://www.scottishfinancialnews.com/articles/scottish-tech-firm-powerphotonic-targets-new-markets-with-ps26m-maven-funding-boost Maven Capital Partners has invested £2.6 million in Scottish advanced laser systems pioneer PowerPhotonic .. follow on from Archangels and Scottish Enterprise Headquartered in Dalgety Bay, Scotland, with a high-volume manufacturing facility in Arizona, USA, PowerPhotonic is a global leader in precision micro-optics for laser applications.

https://www.novuslight.com/first-electronic-photonic-quantum-chip-manufactured-in-commercial-foundry_N13549.html Global Foundries. Northwestern University, Boston University (BU) and University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) have built a tiny photonic quantum system into a traditional electronic chip.

Nvidia co-packaged silicon photonics – switches – and the partner list https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/networking/products/silicon-photonics/https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/scaling-ai-factories-with-co-packaged-optics-for-better-power-efficiency/ block diagrams

Microsoft – quantum safe cryptography https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/08/20/quantum-safe-security-progress-towards-next-generation-cryptography/

Infrastructure, quantum

Quantum weeknotes 2

Following the money ..

Funding for deeptech companies in Europe – 20 VCs https://tech.eu/2025/07/29/chasing-tech-milestones-not-just-capital-key-lessons-from-the-deeptech-hardware-napkin

McKinsey quarterly report June 2025 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-year-of-quantum-from-concept-to-reality-in-2025#/

QC companies began a shift toward revenue generation, earning an estimated $650M–$750M in 2024, and are expected to surpass $1B by the end of 2025. The QComm landscape has three key categories (security, networks, and services) and six key verticals: quantum key distribution (QKD) solutions, postquantum cryptography (PQC), modular interconnects, regional networks, quantum global internet, and QComm services. PQC, which has experienced the most commercialization, has the highest level of maturity

Quantum activity in Scotland https://technologyscotland.scot/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Quantum-2023-Report.pdf hardware suppliers

https://www.sdi.co.uk/news/quantum-drive-boosting-the-commercial-potential-of-tech-innovations SDI April 2024

Securing funding for quantum technology projects that may not be immediately profitable is a huge hurdle. However, there are various avenues in the UK to promote development and support ventures scaling up for commercialisation.

Innovate UK, a UK Government agency, has assisted 15 Scottish companies involved with quantum technologies. Earlier this year, the agency awarded £2.34 million to Skylark Lasers to develop critical equipment for quantum-powered navigation systems. The company has also received investment from Scottish Enterprise.

Scepticism and optimism

Sceptics about quantum computers and the requirement for post quantum cryptography https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/quantum_cryptanalysis_criticism/

Scott Aaronson being optimistic https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8329 Quantum Computing: Between Hope and Hype

by Scott Aaronson September 16, 2024

Origins of quantum computing – Ray LaFlame obit https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8949 All of a sudden, there was a viable path to building a quantum computer out of photons, where you wouldn’t need to get pairs of photons to interact with each other, which had previously been the central sticking point. The key insight was that feedforward measurements, combined with the statistical properties of identical bosons (what the photons are), are enough to simulate the effect of two-photon interactions.

A language for programming quantum algorithms, independent of the specific type of quantum computer on which they are to run. That this kind of thing gets developed is critical to the enabling larger scale use; CUDA is the NVIDIA programming language which enabled GPUs to be used for other things than ray-tracing and running graphics for gaming.

Quipper language embedded in Haskell – functional programming https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3390 Quipper has been used to program a diverse set of non-trivial quantum algorithms, and can generate quantum gate representations using trillions of gates. It is geared towards a model of computation that uses a classical computer to control a quantum device, but is not dependent on any particular model of quantum hardware. Quipper has proven effective and easy to use, and opens the door towards using formal methods to analyze quantum algorithms.