It was a good conference – very much due to the efforts of Louise Smith and the team who organised it – and it showcased a number of good speakers, including the First Minister and the Far North's very own Bob Maclennan.

The topic of the conference was simple, and not so simple.

Simple because it was about harnessing the massive tidal energy of the Pentland Firth (it has been described as "the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy" by experts). And not so simple because the technology, how to get the energy out of the sea, still has some little way to go.

As a background to the conference, I should say that the attendance of MSPs was, like many forms of renewable power, intermittent. This was because we had to dart back over to the Chamber of the Scottish Parliament to vote on the Budget. (When I reappeared at the conference after the final vote, the question delegates kept asking me was "Is the First Minister still the First Minister?")

As I sat in the conference and listened to the various ways that the tidal power might be extracted – including turbines and giant underwater windmill things – my mind went back to my own days in the construction and fabrication industries.

I wonder how many readers of the Groat worked at Kishorn. There must be a few.

I guess I can say that I was a "Kishorn Commando" (although I never got the T-shirt). Albeit I started as a cleaner (loo-brush to the fore) and ended up as night-shift cashier on the Maersk Plotter, a floating canteen moored alongside the massive Ninian Central production platform, I was there. I saw the concrete giant rise up out of the ocean.

Of a night I would climb up from the Plotter to what they called the "cellar deck" where there was a wee wooden hut where the "bears" could buy tea. There I would collect the takings and take them back down to my cash box.

If I wasn't in a rush, I would dally and chat (you could buy fags up there – or indeed, once, raffle tickets for a "see, Jimmy, solid gold" Rolex watch; I didn't win it) and, if I had even more time, it was my delight to go right to the top and stand on the helideck watching the sun come up over the Ross-shire hills.

That view stays with me, first equal with one other: the view down the "centre shaft", the interior of the huge platform.

It was vast, it was circular, it was arc-lit, and with men, like ants, working in all its parts, right down to its bottom far below the surface of the sea outside. I used to think that it was one of the most amazing man-made constructions that I had ever seen.

With its noise and the sparks from the welders' torches it was magnificent – like something out of James Bond, save that it was real. And it's still there, working away.

In those days... you want to build a hollow concrete production platform, float it out, sink it to the ocean floor and start the oil flowing? Never been done before? Difficult?

Or a couple of years later – at Nigg – a six-hollow-legged steel production platform to be connected by "tension legs" to the bottom of the North Sea? Totally new technology? Never been done before?

It is easy to imagine a tobacco-chewing Texan pausing for a minute or two, and then yelling "Let's go!"

That's not quite how it was, although the Texans played their part.

In the case of the Conoco tension leg platform, the TLP at Nigg, it was a totally committed combination of the oil company Conoco and the US construction giant Bechtel (well known in the nuclear industry) that made it happen.

"New territory, new design work on how you attach the legs to the sea-floor template? We'll just get the boys onto it." I was there; I saw the "can do" approach. And it is something that I have not forgotten.

As regards the tidal power of the Pentland Firth, the first thing to say that, in money terms, the rewards can be every bit as great as those achieved by the Ninian and Hutton fields. The second thing to understand is that, if there is the will, then this can be done. I again quote Ninian and Hutton as examples.

So the issue is the will. And going by the conference it is there too.

So here is the way, at least as I see it.

Risk is what will keep the big boys away – what might make even Bechtel pause. But take that risk away, then we could be off. This is where both the Scottish and the UK governments need to step in.

£50 million? £100 million? Probably the latter needs to be put on the table. Money up front – risk money – that should encourage operators and investors to go to the money markets, as well as work closely with the local movers and shakers, the people at the conference, who have done the work so far.

"Oh, but we'll never get that much..."

Not at all. What's the price of ten miles of motorway, or a week in the Iraq war? The prize is, after the investment, virtually free energy on a colossal scale. Every tide – as long as the sun, the moon and the oceans are there, and the Earth turns.

Replacement skilled employment as Dounreay is decommissioned – cheap, locally-generated electricity would be a fantastic boost. Look at it that way, and we've got to make this happen.

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