Why Orkney is once again at the cutting edge of the green revolution

When you enter the small housing estate where Jonathan Porterfield lives, what stands out is that it doesn’t stand out.

The row of grey pebbledash houses could be anywhere from here on Orkney’s Mainland island to Cornwall.

Then, you meet Jonathan, an English, Midlands-born, former Nissan car salesman turned domestic green power guru.

“So you’ve an engineering background ?” I ask him.

“Nah,” he says quick as a flash, “I’m just a geek.”

A geek soon showing me his family energy bill of about £15 for the month (includes about 1500 electric car mileage and electric daily standing charge). Yes – fifteen quid.

Energy so cheap neighbours can – and do – pitch up to plug their cars in for free. So much ultra cheap power he doesn’t fully know what to do with it.

His solar-panelled roof of a small bungalow is routed to a large domestic battery in the hall cupboard one way, and a specialised heat-conversion boiler the other: essentially one of those hand warmer chemical reaction gizmos geared up to domestic boiler size.

True, he laid out around £15,000, but recouped all that in just over three years.

Frontier of green energy

Jonathan stands as a one-man symbol of the wider way in which Orkney has for long been at the frontier of green energy, creating more power than it can use, but also pioneering the mistakes and learning so others don’t have to.

And you see all that writ large in the island of Eday, north of Mainland. At first glance a treeless rather sad place, sheep pasture and moor studded with deserted farms . A symbol of island depopulation where barely a hundred folk now live.

But here of all places we find a cutting edge experiment in pioneering hydrogen.

Cables pipe in the electricity from the tidal barrage just offshore. Half a billion tons of seawater move at 10 mph one way for six hours; then 10 mph the other for six as North Sea meets and greets Atlantic Ocean – predictable, permanent clean energy there for the generating.

But onshore they’ve learned a tough lesson.  Neil Kermode, Orkney’s Mr Green Energy, explains how they, like so many, wrestled with using this clean electricity for the island’s hydrogen powered vehicles.

You can still see hydrogen filling stations at Kirkwall on Mainland, Orkney’s capital . But you don’t see many people filling up. In fact we didn’t see anyone doing so during our short visit.

Neil energetically explains how, try as they might, they had to abandon the hydrogen grail.

“Hydrogen’s cheap to make – very expensive to store in either gas or liquid form. Electric batteries in vans and cars have just leapt forward. There’s just no viable economic space for hydrogen there as we see it.”

So what to do?

Paradoxically, he says, make petrol and diesel!  Eh? Clean tidal electricity making hydrogen and then using that  to make petrol to burn? Crazy.

But here’s the thing. Unlike refinery hydrocarbons, here you take carbon out of the atmosphere to match with hydrogen producing hydrocarbon fuel : diesel or petrol. But when you ignite that fuel in a car engine you’re just sending back carbon you took out.

A huge clean leap from fossil fuel to synthetic petrol and diesel. Cost remains the problem but that, he enthuses, will fall just like electric vehicle costs fell to kill the hydrogen fuel dream as he sees it.

Potential markets for synthetic fuel

The market is waiting. Literally across the moor at the airstrip they’re testing long-range drones. With a 100kg payload, perfect for island to island delivery without waiting on ferry schedules and a ready potential market for that synthetic fuel.

Just this month Amazon, no less, has finally persuaded the Civil Aviation Authority to begin commercial testing at Kirkwall Airport. Yup – mixing piloted commercial planes with pilotless aircraft off the same runway.

Once again Orkney is at the frontier. Once a place where the fossil fuel Klondike brought pioneering energy change generations ago, now Orkney pushes the green energy revolution.

The island’s oil terminal at Flotta operates at a fraction of capacity.  The oil isn’t coming back. But Orkney is working flat out on what comes next.