A small Scottish community is perfecting new technologies that could help to power the green energy industry. Advances in wind and tidal power have turned the Orkney Islands into an exporter of renewable energy, instead of a fossil fuel importer. Rochelle Toplensky reports, Janet Babin hosts.
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Janet Babin: Extreme climate events caused death and destruction across a broad swath of the world this year.
Speaker 2: Millions are suffering in the Pacific Northwest as a stalled out heat dome drives temperatures to historic and dangerous numbers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, uprooted trees, crushed cars, building debris, and possibly the biggest problem of all, much of Southern Louisiana has no electricity.
Janet Babin: Also, this year, a spate of research papers, including one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that unequivocally links this destruction to human activity. The IPCC report was dire, but it did offer one hopeful note. It describes a small window for the world to change course, to limit greenhouse gas emissions and therefore, slowly halt rising temperatures. That action most likely starts with a transformation of the world's energy sector, by some estimates, the origin of more than 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Today, The Future of Everything begins a special series, looking at how the world can move to a zero carbon future. And we're starting with the latest advances in energy production. I'm joined by my colleague, Rochelle Toplensky. Hey, Rochelle.
Rochelle Toplensky: Hey, Janet.
Janet Babin: Rochelle, you're a Wall Street Journal Heard on the Street columnist. So I'm wondering how much of your beat is dedicated to renewable energy?
Rochelle Toplensky: A year, year and a half ago, it was not very much at all, but it's been growing. And now, it's probably close to half.
Janet Babin: Renewables make up about 20% of electricity generation in the US, but that number is growing. Rochelle, are you seeing this transition manifest in the rest of the world as well?
Rochelle Toplensky: Yeah. We're seeing a transition globally as well. I mean, arguably I think Europe is probably a little bit further ahead maybe on this. And there are pockets of innovation that are also emerging even within Europe. And they're not really necessarily where one might expect. One of the places that seems to be leading the way is a tiny archipelago in the North Sea. It's up at the north end of Scotland and it's called Orkney.
Janet Babin: And you went there because despite its small size, this is a place that has made great advances in renewable energy and in fact, has become a test bed of energy innovation for the rest of the world.
Rochelle Toplensky: Orkney really is at the leading edge of figuring out how to use renewable power. And this is a place that's gone from importing fossil fuel based energy to actually exporting energy. And that energy that they're exporting is green energy.
Janet Babin: From The Wall Street Journal, this is The Future of Everything. I'm Janet Babin with Rochelle Toplensky. Today on the show, the start of our series of stories focused on the transition to a decarbonized world. Rochelle, tell us about this place, Orkney.
Rochelle Toplensky: Green rolling hills with patchworks of farms. There are clusters of buildings and windmills dotted around here and there. There are about 22,000 people that live in Orkney. And it's a little bit less than half the size of Rhode Island. Orkney's known for its winds and has had windmills for centuries. But when I spoke to local, Neo (Kermode), who's also a renewables expert, he said, things really took off in the early 2000s.
Neo Kermode: There was then quite a push in (inaudible) 2010, and some small scale wind turbines started to become more available on the market because some people have been playing around with four and five kilowatt machines and suddenly three or four models became available. And so there was a rush of people to put up wind turbines, me being one of them.
Rochelle Toplensky: Now, when you look at the landscape around the main island, you see all kinds of different windmills dotted around.
Neo Kermode: So now, 735, I think it is, wind turbines. It's basically small scale private machines are scattered across the island.
Janet Babin: While those windmills have been around for generations, Orkney is at the end of the line for the British power system. And until recently, it mostly relied on connections with the Scottish mainland for power with diesel generation as a backup. But about eight years ago, that shifted for Orkney.
Rochelle Toplensky: All those windmills and its few solar panels really started to pay off for Orkney. It actually started producing more power than it could use, and had enough leftover to even start exporting it. Kermode chairs a community organization there that promotes renewable energy. Kermode says, a lot of the people who put in wind turbines, for them, it may have been about going green, but also often, it was about saving some money too.
Neo Kermode: Yes, there's a number of people who've been at this and have got technical credibility to make sure it's not just a bunch of green wishes. This is actually practical physics and economics and it does work.
Rochelle Toplensky: But it doesn't actually work for everyone just quite yet. There are people, businesses, and some communities in Orkney that have their own turbines. But for those that don't, they still pay national power prices, which are still expensive.
Janet Babin: I wasn't expecting to hear that they would still have to pay higher prices for power. Is anything being done to address that?
Rochelle Toplensky: Well, they've actually recently just started a small demonstration project this year, which is a super smart power grid that basically links clean energy with electric vehicles and home power and heating and even batteries.
Janet Babin: Wow! So almost a smart city, all connected to a clean grid. Is this something you think the rest of the world can emulate?
Rochelle Toplensky: I think there's definitely lessons to be learned and it can be expanded out. I mean, one of the crucial things that's happened for Orkney is that the costs of wind power and solar have come down so significantly and make the economics work. And that really is a global story. So the cost of wind turbines and solar panels have fallen by around 90% over the last decade or so. And so now, where we sit, is that about two thirds of the world population actually lives in a country where wind or solar are the cheapest way to generate new power and crucially, that's without any subsidies.
Janet Babin: And now, Orkney isn't stopping there. They're starting to experiment with advanced wind turbine techniques.
Rochelle Toplensky: Yeah, they are. They're starting to build wind farms offshore.
Janet Babin: Offshore turbines are placed further from shore where they can capture more wind. Last summer, more than 70 developers put in bids for offshore wind sites around Orkney in Scotland.
Rochelle Toplensky: But one of the things that becomes a lot more obvious as well when you're an Orkney is that, there's a lot of energy in that water as well. And this is another area that Orkney is leading the way in, working to figure out how to harness marine energy.
Janet Babin: Anyone whose stood in the ocean and been hit by a wave knows for sure the power that's in the ocean, but being able to harness that energy, Rochelle, how does that work?
Rochelle Toplensky: So there's basically two main types of marine energy that they're looking to harness, the energy from the waves and also the energy from the tides. And both, strangely, are actually quite predictable. Currently, the way that the machines that they're building try to capture energy from the waves is two general approaches. So the first is by floating a machine on the top of the water and it bends back and forth with the wave movement. And that gives it the way to capture the energy. The other main approach is one that floats underneath the surface of the water, and it bobs up and down and captures the pressure change in the waves as it goes past.
Janet Babin: What about for tidal energy?
Rochelle Toplensky: So tidal energy is a bit different. Tides obviously move in six hour cycles, so they're even more predictable. And basically what they do is, is have an underwater windmill that spins around and captures the energy as the water moves back and forth. One of the reasons that we know so much about wave and tidal energy is because Orkney created the European Marine Energy Centre, which is known as EMEC. And they study and focus there on how we can harness energy from the ocean.
Eileen Linklater: I'm Eileen Linklater. And I worked for the European Marine Energy Centre known as EMEC.
Rochelle Toplensky: Why don't you describe where we are, and tell me a bit about the test site.
Eileen Linklater: We are at EMEC's wave test site at Billia Croo, which is on the West Coast of Orkney. We've chosen this site as a wave test state because of the amazing waves that crash in on the shore in front of us. The average wave height here is maybe only between two to three meters, but we've measured waves as high as 18 meters here at the site. So that's about the same as the six-story building.
Rochelle Toplensky: When I was there, it was an absolutely beautiful day, but quite honestly, the waves were a little bit underwhelming. Even then there was a lot going on underneath the surface. The Centre has installed power cables that run under the water out to multiple tests sites in the sea. And out there is where companies can come in, plug in their technology and get it tested.
Janet Babin: Some of these machines are being tested at EMEC and they're already producing usable energy.
Eileen Linklater: So the electricity that's generated, even by prototype devices at sea, can still be supplying local homes and businesses. And importantly, the companies who are testing these devices can also be paid for the electricity that they produce.
Rochelle Toplensky: Water is about 800 times more dense than air. Meaning, it carries a lot of energy as it moves. So tides and waves carry a lot of predictable green power. And that's something that investors could really get excited about.
Eileen Linklater: There's a huge potential global market for marine energy. It's been estimated around 76 billion pounds. And that's very attractive for the UK as a world leader as an export market. But it's also really important, in terms of the fight against climate change, that we play a role in making sure that we can get the global adoption of these technologies as quick as possible.
Janet Babin: 76 billion pounds, that's about $100 billion US dollars.
Rochelle Toplensky: Companies can come here and they don't have to worry about getting planning permission or building infrastructure to test their technology out. And also, if they're successful, they leave with solid test results to bring to their investors.
Janet Babin: Orkney's Centre has been working out so well that now they're starting to help others to develop similar programs. I wanted to get the opinion of an outside voice regarding marine energy. So I turn to Jules Kortenhorst, he's chief executive officer of the Rocky Mountain Institute. That's a nonprofit that's working to accelerate the world's clean energy transition. Kortenhorst has done a lot. He's served as a member of the Dutch parliament. He worked for almost a decade at Royal Dutch Shell. And he was also an analyst at McKinsey & Company. So Kortenhorst can offer a wide perspective on future trends when it comes to renewable energy.
Jules Kortenhorst: As to marine electricity, electricity from the movements of the ocean, the advantage of that solution is that the oceans are constantly moving because of tides, because of the ebbs and floods. It is a very consistent energy pattern.
Janet Babin: Unlike the variability of the sun or the wind, with tides, again, as Rochelle said, we can predict water movements in advance.
Rochelle Toplensky: But that predictability really comes with a price.
Jules Kortenhorst: The downside is that generating power from the ocean is generating power from a very hostile environment, salty water that is moving back and forth. And that puts a lot of stress on the equipment. So, so far, we have not seen that marine power generation or tidal power generation can actually get to the same low cost levels as wind and solar.
Janet Babin: Rochelle, I'm wondering what the response is to these kinds of comments that you're hearing from the marine energy community in Orkney.
Rochelle Toplensky: They're really quick to acknowledge that working in a harsh sea environment is a very big challenge. And also, the assertion that marine energy is still too expensive, it is. But what they're doing at EMEC is trying to solve exactly those problems.
Janet Babin: Up next, Rochelle takes us on a visit to see another type of marine energy technology in the North Sea. Orkney got so good at harnessing power from wind, and even from the little bit of solar power it can gather, that it's now trying new methods to squeeze every bit of renewable energy it can from another of its abundant natural resources, the ocean. Remember that the ocean tides ebb and flow based on the moon and sun's gravitational pull. And that movement is essentially unharnessed energy. And that's what Orkney is trying to capture.
Rochelle Toplensky: So when I was out in Orkney, I actually got to go out and tour a test site of one of these latest developments in tidal energy technology. To see them in action, I went out to where two oceans collide.
Speaker 8: (inaudible).
Rochelle Toplensky: It was a beautiful sunny morning when I showed up at the local marina and walked down the docks to hop on a 40 foot boat.
Speaker 8: (inaudible).
Rochelle Toplensky: We journeyed out about half an hour from the mainland to this spot on the edge, the very edge of the North Sea. So we're here. We're at the platform.
Dan Wise: Yeah, sure. So welcome to the Fall of Warness.
Rochelle Toplensky: This is Dan Wise. He works for a local company called Orbital Marine Power. He's in charge of keeping its tidal energy platform operating and secured in place.
Dan Wise: This site is quite unique. We're sitting here really in the junction between the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the North Sea to the east.
Rochelle Toplensky: That junction is turbulent and the conditions are harsh. Even on the day I went out, which was unusually calm and sunny, once we got out to this tidal testing site, the power of the water rushing through the strait was absolutely amazing. It was like, I don't know, like a fireman's hose just gushing past us. The engine of our boat had to keep running the entire time we were there just to keep us level with the tidal energy platform, but that's really the point.
Dan Wise: And essentially, it's a really good site for us to test our technology because every six hours you've got this battle of water masses that are moving through the site, which is squeezed between the land masses and it creates really strong tidal flows. But what you see here on site today is our (inaudible) O2, [crosstalk 00:16:38.
Rochelle Toplensky: Wise is showing me Orbital's two megawatt floating tidal turbine. It's a commercial demonstration machine that was just launched in April. It generates enough electricity to power about 2000 homes. Orbital says that if that energy was to come from fossil fuels, it would generate about 2200 metric tons of CO2 annually.
Janet Babin: Rochelle, what does it look like?
Rochelle Toplensky: It's about the size of a 747 and it looks, well, like a big yellow submarine, but it's got two shiny spider legs sticking out of it. Those two legs are really one of the keys to this machine's design. At the end of each leg, there is a rotor, which has blades that are about 32 feet long approximately. So it's kind of looks like a windmill, if you will. And those can be lowered down into the water to capture the energy from the tides, but they can also be brought back up to the surface, so that people can do quick and relatively easy maintenance on them.
Janet Babin: Yeah, I can't imagine doing manual maintenance in the rough conditions of the North Sea. It could be one of the biggest challenges to this technology.
Rochelle Toplensky: Yeah. I mean, it would be kind of like trying to imagine changing a flat tire in the middle of a hurricane.
Janet Babin: What about the impact of these platforms on marine life and the environment?
Rochelle Toplensky: There's definitely concerns that fish, birds, or even marine mammals could collide with the machines, or could even be driven away by the noise of them. It is something that EMEC is studying, both of their sites and of the technologies that are there. So they're monitoring them with cameras, sonar, even hydrophones. And so far, they've seen very few issues, but they are working to minimize the risks and the impact, because they know that these technologies need to be safe and they need to minimize the amount of impact, if they're going to be deployed widely.
Janet Babin: These are just a few of the technologies being tested at EMEC. There are other innovations underway there.
Rochelle Toplensky: There are indeed. There's a whole bunch of different wave technologies and two different tidal technologies there. And basically, the tech is being proven to work in real conditions in the ocean. And as we mentioned before, they then come away with that proof. And so the next stage is for industry to figure out which are the best options for which locations, and then really start to scale it up.
Janet Babin: And when that happens, the price usually drops, right? Isn't that what we saw with solar and wind?
Rochelle Toplensky: Yeah. The EU expects that the cost will come down to around 100 euros per megawatt hour, which is about $116 US dollars per megawatt hour, by the end of this decade for tidal.
Janet Babin: Orkney has made great strides in being able to generate power from its tides and its wind, but they're still figuring out the best ways to utilize that power. That's next. Orkney has been experimenting with alternative power for decades now. And they're beginning to reap some benefits from all their efforts.
Rochelle Toplensky: It's a testament to Orkney's determination and grit that it's become a powerhouse of renewable energy innovation and developed enough green power to start exporting it.
Janet Babin: They've been so successful that the power cable back to the Scottish mainland is now full of cleanly produced energy. And Orkney is now working to get another link installed, so it can export even more.
Rochelle Toplensky: But until that happens, (Orcadian) producers have had to start shutting off their turbines, something called curtailment.
Janet Babin: That is disheartening, Rochelle, especially when I think that this is clean energy and it's just going to waste.
Rochelle Toplensky: It is. And that's exactly the same thought that they're having there. So EMEC started experimenting with ways that they could store that extra energy instead of losing it.
Janet Babin: Now, energy storage is a vital component of advancing clean energy technology. As we said, the problem with wind and solar energy is that it's intermittent, right? There are cloudy days and some windless nights. So figuring out how to store excess clean energy when the getting is good, that would advance the entire industry.
Rochelle Toplensky: Orkney has experimented with batteries, but they also came up with a unique solution a few years ago, using that excess clean energy to make and store hydrogen.
Janet Babin: Hydrogen is the most plentiful chemical in the universe. It's essential and we need it to keep living. And conveniently, it's also a carrier of energy.
Rochelle Toplensky: And as a carrier of energy, it is a really promising fuel because it doesn't release any greenhouse gases when it's used. So people are really excited about using hydrogen as a clean fuel for things like long haul transport in ships or in airplanes, and also for processes that can't really easily use electricity, so things like making steel or cement.
Janet Babin: But the problem with hydrogen is that it takes a lot of energy to be separated from other elements and turned into a workable fuel. If you're using fossil fuels to make hydrogen, you're not really making renewable energy.
Rochelle Toplensky: But there is a clean way to make hydrogen. Hydrogen that's made using renewable electricity instead of burning fossil fuels is known as green hydrogen. And that's what Orkney has been doing for a few years now. To see it in action, I visited EMEC's hydrogen center. Now, like me, you might be expecting it to be in some high-tech or industrial site, but it was actually located right there on the side of one of Orkney's main marinas. I met up with EMEC's research and development engineer, James Ferguson.
James Ferguson: Yeah. So here in Kirkwall Pier, we've got a marina. So we've got lots of sailing boats tied up nearby. (crosstalk).
Rochelle Toplensky: This is part of EMEC's hydrogen site. It's where Orkney is experimenting with storing some of that extra clean energy it generates as hydrogen. There are a couple of ways to separate hydrogen from other elements, and one of the most common, and the one that is being used in Orkney, is called electrolysis. Ferguson explained to me how they take energy from those tidal platforms that I visited.
James Ferguson: EMEC deployed a machine called an electrolyzer, which uses electricity generated from these machines to split water, to split H2O into H2 and O2. And the electrical energy is then stored as chemical energy in the form of hydrogen.
Rochelle Toplensky: So that hydrogen is essentially stored energy, but it's stored in a way that is transportable.
James Ferguson: And then we can use that hydrogen just like we use any other kind of fuel, so for transport in vehicles, or for electricity generation, or for heating.
Rochelle Toplensky: The hydrogen is stored in tanks about the size of the helium tanks that you'd find at a kid's birthday party. And the center where they're stored is really just a fenced-off yard, basically, on the side of the marina. What could you do with one tank of one of these?
James Ferguson: If you give me a second, I can calculate that.
Rochelle Toplensky: I mean, it can be rough. Basically, it takes the tidal platform about 15 to 20 minutes to generate enough power to fill one hydrogen tank with about four kilograms of the gas. And that's enough to fill up a hydrogen powered passenger car, which is sort of like an electric vehicle, but it runs on hydrogen and it can go for about 400 miles.
Janet Babin: The complaints I've heard about hydrogen, Rochelle, include things like flammability, right? There is that notorious example, the Hindenburg air disaster.
Rochelle Toplensky: Yes, yes. I definitely... Oh yes, every time I write a column about hydrogen people bring up the Hindenburg disaster.
James Ferguson: I think it's worth pointing out that the Hindenburg happened over 80 years ago, which is a really long time in terms of engineering development.
Rochelle Toplensky: It's also really important to note that we use hydrogen in a lot of industrial processes already today, like refineries and making fertilizers. So there are still some uses that need to be developed, but we do know how to handle it and transport it safely already.
Janet Babin: Critics also mention how energy intensive it is to make usable hydrogen. And like we said, you do have to separate out the hydrogen element and it does take a lot of energy to do that.
Rochelle Toplensky: But you need to remember, in Orkney, with its excess green energy, that's what they use to make this. So they're really capturing green energy that would otherwise be lost.
Janet Babin: But what about the cost of making green hydrogen? I mean, does it make sense? Can the world scale up and if so, what would it take to do that?
Rochelle Toplensky: The cost is still too high, but it's expected to be cost competitive by the end of this decade. Now, remember, there was an 80% decrease in the costs of wind and solar over a 10 year period. And there is a lot of serious money behind hydrogen now, looking at scaling it up over the next decade.
Janet Babin: I asked Jules Kortenhorst about this again. He's the CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute. He too was really hopeful about hydrogen. And he told me he fully expects it to be part of the world's mix to decarbonize.
Jules Kortenhorst: Hydrogen is definitely a part of our energy future. Hydrogen can be made very effectively through electrolysis through the use of clean electricity from wind and solar into a very nice form of energy storage and can be used in certain parts of our economy where other solutions might not work. So I believe that that is also a part of our energy future.
Janet Babin: Rochelle, we have learned so much from your trip to Orkney. And the world is learning so much about clean energy from the people on Orkney. Are there any other takeaways?
Rochelle Toplensky: One of the biggest remaining challenges is really about when renewables start to take off and become a much bigger part of the power mix. They're still intermittent, and so we need to be figuring out how to store that extra when you have it, so that you can use it when there is a gap later on. And that really is the next big challenge.
Janet Babin: And it's a linchpin issue. It's really what we need to know, if we're going to be able to transition more fully away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. And that's what we're going to explore on the next episode of FOE. Rochelle, I want to thank you so much for your reporting. Plus, I want to go to Orkney now.
Rochelle Toplensky: I really enjoyed it too, so I can understand why you'd want to go. Thanks very much, Janet.
Janet Babin: The Future of Everything is a production of The Wall Street Journal. Stephanie Elgin-Fritz is the editorial director of The Future of Everything. Leigh Kamping-Carder is deputy editor of The Future of Everything. Our sound designer is Sarah Gibalaska. Our fact checker is Maddie Bender. Thanks so much to Orkney audio producer, Dave Gray, for the help, and to my colleague, Rochelle Toplensky for reporting this episode. Kateri Jochum is The Wall Street Journal's executive producer of audio. I'm Janet Babin. Thanks for listening.