Yes, I am standing somewhere windswept and talking about infrastructure.
I have a style!
Also, that whooshing sound you can hear?
That's the other turbine that you can't see in this camera shot.
Anyway. Power grids! They have to balance supply and demand.
I've talked about that a few times in the past here. But as a quick catch up,
if there's not enough power being generated, things break.
But if there's too much power being generated, things also break.
And arguably in a worse way.
There isn't a battery in the world
big enough to deal with the daily peaks and troughs of national demand.
So power grid engineers have to make sure that the power being generated
is always close to the power that's being used.
There are a lot of possible technologies to help with that balance.
And I've talked about some of those before here, too.
Pumped storage that uses a lake as a giant battery, or even the big
lithium-ion setup in Australia that's only caught on fire once so far.
But all of those technologies assume that supply and demand
will balance each other out over time, usually over a few hours.
What happens if you always have too much power?
Welcome to the Orkney Islands, in the far north east of Scotland.
About 22,000 people live here, on around 1,000 windswept square kilometers.
And they have so much renewable energy from wind and waves and tides
that it's genuinely a problem.
Solution number one is: turn off the turbines.
- 2013, we were producing up to 130% of our electrical needs.
So there can be quite a lot of curtailment on several turbines.
There's active network management.
The wind turbine will be shut down because the network can't handle the load.
There's been a moratorium on any new grid connections.
There is potential for some microgeneration, but nothing of any scale.
So when you're in a place like Orkney, where you have some of the best
generation potential, it's a complete waste.
- Turning off the turbines isn't a good solution. It's wasteful.
Depending on the time of day and year,
these islands need between 7 and 46 megawatts.
It's almost always windy here, so a couple of big commercial wind farms
like this can produce all the power that folks here need.
But they've also got 500 domestic turbines, privately owned.
1 in 12 households generate their own power.
Because why wouldn't you?
Once you pay the installation costs,
you'll probably turn a profit, year after year after year.
One of the things I struggled with, writing this script. is
that there is so much going on up here.
There's an electric hybrid plane being tested at the airport.
There are tidal power experiments, wave power experiments.
Every type of renewable energy, almost, is being tested here.
...there's not much solar.
And there's a backup: for the very rare days
when the wind is calm, there are interconnector cables
that can pull up to 40 megawatts from the Scottish mainland.
But OK: they're generating a massive surplus of power,
and they're connected to the British National Grid.
So surely solution number two is: use those interconnectors?
They can just sell the extra power back to the mainland.
Well, those 40 megawatts that the interconnectors can handle?
That's not actually all that much.
- The interconnector cables we've got are small.
We reckon there's 2,000 megawatts of tidal and wave generation around here.
We reckon there's 17,000 megawatts of offshore wind
within a couple of hundred kilometers of here.
The interconnector was built
for an old day when you used to burn coal and send us electricity.
That's gone. We don't do that anymore.
We now need to be in a position where we've got a better way to get the power
from these islands away.
- If the new interconnector is built, it carry enough power
for all the turbines that Orkney could reasonably put up in the next few years.
They could power most of the highlands of Scotland.
But building that new interconnector will cost a quarter of a billion pounds.
National government requires that the islands approve plans for enough
new turbines to make sure it's going to be used, before it's approved.
That's all still in the balance politically.
So solution number three is that the islands could start using more electricity.
There's already a larger share of electric cars here
than anywhere else in Scotland. But most vehicles still use petrol or diesel.
That could change. There's still a lot of oil heating.
The ferries, vital for getting around, still burn fossil fuels.
The transition is a slow process.
No one's going to scrap a perfectly good car or heater - or ferry -
unless they have to.
But there are plans.
And Orkney's also had a hydrogen fuel system for years, to help soak up a bit of the excess power.
We're producing hydrogen from, effectively, spare electricity.
That's why we started.
We're taking electricity, putting it into fresh water,
and it splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
We're getting rid of the oxygen and we're just capturing the hydrogen.
We're compressing it, and then we're using it in this fuel cell.
We have ferries that operate within the islands. One of those ferries
is able to be powered by this fuel cell when it ties up alongside at night.
And it saves it running its own engines,
or it saves it drawing power from the grid.
This is just the start of something.
This equipment is experimental and believe me, it's not efficient.
This is not the best way of doing it.
But we're finding our way into new territory.
We try and unearth
some of the challenges so that when we scale this equipment up, then
those faults have been polished out.
- These islands are years ahead of the rest of the world.
This is the test bed.
This is a small version of the changes that the whole planet is going to make.
The transition to renewables
is happening faster here in Orkney than, I think, anywhere else in the world.
But as you travel around these islands, it just seems normal.
Nothing's visibly changed, but the lessons
that they're learning here will hopefully pave the way for the rest of the world.