August 22, 2024
Once the place where Klondike’s fossil fuels pioneered the energy shift a generation ago, Orkney is now driving the green energy revolution.
When you enter the small house where Jonathan Porterfield lives, the important thing is not visible.
Rows of gray pebbledash houses could be anywhere from Orkney’s Mainland to Cornwall.
Then, you meet Jonathan, an English, Midlands-born, former Nissan car salesman turned domestic green power guru.
“So you have an engineering background?” I asked him.
“Nah,” he said as fast as lightning, “I’m just a geek.”
A geek recently shared his family’s energy bill of about £15 a month (including about 1500 electric cars and daily electricity costs). Yes – fifteen thousand.
The energy so that the neighborhood is cheap can – and does – go up to plug the car for free. So much ultra cheap power they don’t know what to do with it.
The solar-panel roof of a small bungalow is routed to a large domestic battery in the hall closet one way, and a special heat conversion boiler the other: essentially one of the gizmos of the chemical reaction hand warmer directed to the size of the domestic boiler.
True, he provided around ÂŁ15,000, but returned it all in just three years.
Frontier of green energy
Jonathan stands as a one-man symbol of the way that Orkney has been for a long time on the frontier of green energy, making more power than it can be used, but also pioneering mistakes and learning so that others should not.
And you see everything written large on the island of Eday, north of the Mainland. At first, it was a rather sad place with no trees, sheep pastures and fields planted with lonely farms. A symbol of the depopulation of an island that now has less than a hundred people.
But here all the places we find cutting-edge experiments in pioneering hydrogen.
The cable pipe in the electricity from the tidal barrage is just offshore. Half a billion tons of sea water move at 10 mph one way for six hours; then another 10 mph for six as the North Sea meets and greets the Atlantic Ocean – predictably, clean energy is permanently there to generate.
But on land, he had learned a hard lesson. Neil Kermode, Mr Green Energy Orkney, explains how he, like many, is struggling to use this clean electricity for hydrogen vehicles on the island.
You can still see a hydrogen filling station in Kirkwall on the Mainland, the capital of Orkney. But you don’t see many people filling it. In fact, we didn’t see anyone doing this during our short visit.
Neil energetically explained how, try as they might, they had to abandon the hydrogen grail.
“It’s cheap to make hydrogen – it’s too expensive to store it in gas or liquid form. Electric batteries in vans and cars are just leaps and bounds ahead. There’s no economic place to use hydrogen out there as far as we can see.
So what to do?
Paradoxically, he said, make gasoline and diesel! Huh? Clean tidal electricity makes hydrogen and then uses it to make gasoline to burn? insane.
But here’s the thing. Unlike refinery hydrocarbons, here you take carbon from the atmosphere to match it with a hydrocarbon fuel that produces hydrogen: diesel or gasoline. But when you burn fuel in your car’s engine, you’re only sending out carbon emissions.
A huge clean leap from fossil fuels to synthetic gasoline and diesel. Cost remains an issue, but, he is happy, it will come down just as the cost of electric vehicles has come down to kill the dream of hydrogen fuel as he sees it.
Market potential for synthetic fuels
The market is waiting. Literally across the fields at the airfield, they were testing long-range drones. With a payload of 100kg, it is perfect for island-to-island delivery without waiting for ferry schedules and a ready potential market for the synthetic fuel.
Just this month Amazon, no less, finally persuaded the Civil Aviation Authority to begin commercial testing at Kirkwall Airport. Yup – mixing piloted commercial aircraft with unmanned aircraft from the same runway.
Once again Orkney is on the border. Once the place where Klondike’s fossil fuels pioneered the energy shift a generation ago, Orkney is now driving the green energy revolution.
The island’s oil terminal in Flotta is operating at low capacity. The oil did not return. But Orkney is working on what to do next.
