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Strong winds, powerful tides, and crashing waves make Scotland's beautiful northern Orkney islands a pretty tough place to live. But they've also helped make the archipelago a renewable energy powerhouse. Now Orkney produces more electricity than it can use or export.
So the islands are becoming a test case for using hydrogen produced with renewable energy to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases behind climate change. This facility on Orkney's Eday island can take excess output from wind or tidal turbines and use it to make hydrogen, and that can be used, they hope, to power the fairies that run around this archipelago.
Backed by the Orkney based European Marine Energy Centre, the ED electrolyzer in 2017 became the first in the world to use tidal power to make hydrogen. In an electrolyzer, an electric current is run through water to break it into hydrogen and oxygen. A fuel cell can reverse the process using hydrogen to generate electricity with clean water, the only byproduct.
If the power used to produce the hydrogen comes from renewable sources, then using the gas instead of fossil fuels will help cut carbon emissions while also eliminating local pollution. But using hydrogen has challenges. The gas is bulky, few people have experience working with it, and the equipment can be costly to buy and to maintain.
Some of the tricky things is the fact that large renewable resources, such as we have here in Orkney can be in remote areas that are fairly far away, such as ED for example, where we are now. So that's one of the big challenges... is making a machine that is robust enough to be maintained by just one or two people on the area and is keeping it function over that time.
John Clipsham, EMEC's hydrogen manager says the Orkney project is yielding valuable experience. We've already demonstrated successfully that we can produce hydrogen for use as a transport fuel. So we're running a small fleet of vans here, which the council are operating.
We have heating systems installed over on Shapinsay, and a second one being installed on the island of Eday, where we produce the hydrogen to demonstrate the heating side. And we also operate a fuel cell at the Harbour, which is used to repower the ferries at night.
A new focus is on using hydrogen to power the ferriers as they sail between Orkney's islands. In June, a consortium won more than 12m euros in funding to develop the power system for what it expects to be the world's first hydrogen fueled seagoing car and passenger ferry due to launch in 2021.
Now there's only two or three places in the world that are actually working on hydrogen ferries. So there's a bit of a race going on. But at the end of the day, we're proving that you can take the wind and the waves of the tides around us and use it to propel vessels through the water.
With interest in hydrogen growing fast around the world, the Orkney project offers an important test of the role that the gas can play in a new energy economy.
