Scottish Microgrid Is a Huge Success

Here’s a short BBC video that presents what the island of Eigg, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, has done to establish a microgrid using hydrokinetics, wind, and solar PV.  Prior to its establishment, each house had its own generator that ran on fossil fuels, and only at night.

Everyone’s thrilled with the new  microgrid, so much so that they like to show it off to visitors from foreign countries, who may be trying to figure out how this can be done in their own lands.

Not to take anything away from these folks’ accomplishments, but the resources are excellent, especially wind, which is noted for its consistency.  When Mendelssohn was composing his Scottish Symphony between 1829 and 1842, he lived in Scotland, often journeying to the Hebrides, where he would sit for periods of time in various caves, listening to the unique sounds the sometimes gale-force winds would create.

There are only 87 residents, so they make use of “small wind,” I’m guessing from the video perhaps 20 KW apiece.  One can imagine a utility-scale turbine on the mountain behind the houses in the photo below. You’d have enough power to run an aluminum smelting plant.

I only wish the video could have mentioned the software that is employed here, integrating the three resources seamlessly.  When one of our clients here at 2GreenEnergy asks about this, I turn them over immediately to an associate of ours, Dr. Peter Lilienthal, arguably the world’s foremost expert in hybrid power optimization.  The software that he and his team created – initially at the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) has been used by over 36,000 energy practitioners in 193 countries.