 THERE is a pub on Duke Street at the foot of Leith Walk that opens at six o'clock in the morning. In Leith's industrial heyday the bar was filled at dawn with thirsty dock workers who stepped in for a pint at the end of a night shift. But as industry declined in Edinburgh's historic port, the pub's clientele now no longer work on the docks.  While some of them have retained the habit of taking a drink or two first thing in the morning, the area is now bustling with younger residents who pass by in suits and heels on their way to offices in town.  Since the 1990s, there has been significant progress in transforming the industrial grit of the port of Leith into a haven of smart restaurants, bars and balconied flats. albeit, as the morning drinkers on Duke Street would probably agree, there is still a long way to go.  In 2008, an ambitious masterplan to tackle a further 350 acres stretching from Granton harbour to the Leith docks was approved by City of Edinburgh Council, sanctioning the development of 16,000 flats, offices, shops and much more.  But even though the planning application was passed in record time, the economic crisis rendered the plans for Edinburgh's waterfront as worthless as the not inconsiderable amount of paper on which the proposals were drafted.  The dawn of 2008 ushered in no ordinary year. In January 2008, australian infrastructure fund Babcock &amp; Brown took a sizeable 20 per cent stake in Forth Ports - the area's largest landowner - sparking rumours it was looking to take control of the last publicly-listed ports business in the UK.  But the investor that would eventually become known as arcus Infrastructure Partners only managed to get its hands on the prize in March of this year with a GBP746 million buyout of Fort Ports.  Despite the deal's long delay, it would have been early on that the true extent of the ravages of the property recession became clear to Forth Ports' chief executive Charles Hammond.  Several developers who were either planning to build or were actually on site in Leith collapsed or simply downed tools to weather the storm.  By the end of 2008, the value of Forth Ports' land was knocked down from GBP282m to just GBP60m, with more than 80 per cent of it deemed of "no immediate value" by property evaluators DTZ.  What this number made clear was that the investment model that had so far driven the transformation of Leith from a declining industrial zone to a shiny new waterfront haven would need to be scotched, forcing a massive about-face in how the area would develop.  The result, three years later, is nothing less than a plan for the "re-industrialisation" of Leith. The core of this is a proposal to develop a massive 200 megawatt biomass plant, to be built in a joint venture with energy giant Scottish &amp; Southern Energy (SSE) on the eastern-most dock which houses a - now mothballed - grain silo.  But what is only just coming to light is that the biomass plant is simply the first step in this re-industrialisation.  In 2008, the plan for the dock was to build houses, parks and possibly a museum or arena over the next 20 years, depending on market demand.  But instead, Forth Ports is set to scrap this plan entirely and make the dock the new manufacturing centre of a potential GBP100 billion industry developing offshore wind turbines for the North Sea.  This radical shift in approach was underpinned by last week's revelation in Scotland on Sunday that the flagship Ocean Terminal shopping centre was to be put up for sale by Forth Ports for GBP100m.  For Hammond, who has been a director of Forth Ports for a decade and who saw hundreds of millions come into the firm's coffers on the sale of overpriced land, the property game is over.  "Regeneration is now broader than flats and shops. It is about jobs and new industry," he says. "The renewables industry is about creating new income-generating assets. What encourages me is we have already received a number of expressions of interest from a number of parties."  One of these is Mitsubishi Power Systems Europe, which is eyeing the Leith port as a base for its GBP100m Centre for advanced Technology. The Spanish wind turbine manufacturer Gamesa has also indicated it will move into the Dundee docks, where Forth Ports has a similar biomass plan.  The biomass plants are necessary to power the factories envisaged for the two ports.  Hammond also dangles the prospect that the facility, which would produce heat as well as electricity, could be used as the source of a new district heating system for the residents of Leith. 