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Letter from America, the Proclaimers' first big hit, made a link between the industrial clearances of Scotland following the 1980s recession and Allan Ramsay's lament for the Highland Clearances written 260 years before, Lochaber No More.

Bathgate no more, they sang, Linwood no more, Methil no more, Irvine no more.

Were they right? The scars of the 1980s are still there to see, both in gaps in opportunity and in the social cost still carried by communities and families.

Around Bathgate, West Lothian's metal bashers and truck-builders were replaced first with Silicon Glen jobs, many of them since gone, and more recently with retail parks.

Linwood, likewise, features a huge Asda, plus showrooms for foreign-built cars where once the Hillman Imp was manufactured.

Irvine's skyline is dominated by a gigantic paper mill, but Volvo trucks are long gone. Lochaber is carving out a niche as Britain's tourism honeypot for outdoor recreation.

Energy jobs

And Methil no more? I was there for much of today, reporting for television on the way it looks on the day Britain just makes it across the line that marks the end to recession.

The Fife town's not short of its challenges, with welfare dependent families and household debt, as I was hearing from the boss of Fife's Citizens Advice Bureaux.

Further east along the Firth of Forth coast, towards Dunfermline, their caseload is more from new types of client - such as the aspirational middle-class who over-extended themselves with debt and fell foul of the downturn in the financial sector.

But Fife and Methil have a grand plan to confound the Proclaimers, with £11m of Scottish government money so far and more to be announced imminently backed up by European cash.

The idea is the Fife Energy Park, clearing 56 hectares of shoreside land to tap into the potential for renewable energy. The quayside, soon to have a £3m upgrade, used to be Scotland's biggest port for exporting coal.

That's the same ground where some of the largest steel structures ever created were assembled, as jackets for North Sea oil platforms. The biggest reached a colossal 26,000 tonnes.

The third wave of energy jobs is seeing BiFab (Burntisland Fabricators) take the lead on constructing jackets, or platforms, for offshore wind turbines.

The company is churning through its current order for 30 jackets, each weighing nearly 500 tonnes, at a rate of one roll-out a week, and destined for the Irish Sea.

Scotland's yards

Drawing on its knowledge of producing sub-sea kit for the offshore hydrocarbons industry, the company is producing the enormous steel structures on an assembly line, with minimal scaffolding, proving an efficient advantage over bespoke structures.

And they're having to do so with extraordinary requirements for the strength of the structures - not only facing the familiar challenge of offshore weather conditions, but adding to that the repetitive strains of a 130-metre wind turbine placed on top.

The imminent announcement of government support is to help BiFab expand its capacity to 120 such jackets a year.

Scottish Enterprise, the government's development agency, also hopes to build up the supply chain locally, as BiFab currently has to source many of its components from around the world.

When you consider there are plans to erect 8,000 such wind turbines around Britain's coast, you can see there's going to be a lot of work to go around.

BiFab has yards at Burntisland in Fife and Arnish near Stornoway.

And you can see why there is concern that the American owners of the Nigg yard in Easter Ross - similarly a hive of oil platform construction activity in the 1970s and 1980s -are so reluctant to commit to developing the site for renewable energy potential.

If Britain doesn't build up its capacity for such work, the potential economic boost could easily go to competitor countries.

The fact that the turbines atop these jackets will be made in Denmark and Germany is a reminder of what happened as a result of throwing away Scotland's technological lead in wind energy during the 1980s.

Another striking aspect of the business: given the scale of the ambitions for offshore windfarms, they're going to have to go some to compensate for the very large carbon footprint in places such as Methil where the structures are being created.