Teleprompter Demo: Scottish Accent

A tide table

0:12Right, good afternoon. I will start with a tide table, because it is the only Uh... document in the energy business that has never once been wrong.

0:22High water at Stroma on the fourteenth of March twenty forty-one will arrive at eleven fifty-two in the morning, give or take a couple of minutes. I can tell you that today, and so can anyone with a copy of the astronomical constants and a long afternoon. Try doing that with the wind. [laughs]

The company and the Pentland Firth

0:42My name is on the door of a wee company in Wick, and we build tidal stream turbines for the Pentland Firth, the stretch of water between Caithness and Orkney where the North Atlantic tries to squeeze into the North Sea at up to sixteen knots. and by small I mean eleven of us and a dog called Boaty, who is on the payroll, technically, for tax reasons, I am told.

1:05It is one of the wildest tidal races in the world, and for most of the last twenty years it has been a very good way of destroying expensive machinery.

What killed the first generation

1:16So let me, let me just... So let me tell you what killed the first generation, because we worked on two of them. They used gearboxes, in a nacelle, on a seabed foundation, at a depth of thirty to fifty metres, and every time a seal failed or a bearing went, you needed a dynamic positioning vessel at about a hundred and twenty thousand pounds a day and a weather window that might not come until April.

1:42Availability was dreadful, was dreadful. [sighs] One machine I will not name spent sixty-one percent of its first year waiting for a boat.

1:54And I was on that boat, by the way. Not the boat it was waiting for, the wrong boat. Eleven hours in a force seven, off Stroma, in February, holding a bucket, explaining to a very nice man from a pension fund that this was all perfectly normal. [laughs]

What this machine does differently

2:10Our machine does three things differently. It is a floating platform, moored on a four-point catenary system, so the whole unit can be towed to the harbour at Scrabster in under nine hours.

2:22The generator is a uh, direct-drive, permanent magnet design with no gearbox whatsoever, which removes the component responsible for roughly half of all the historic failures. And the two rotors, at twenty metres in diameter, are fixed-pitch, bidirectional composite blades, so there is no pitch mechanism to seize up and no yaw system to go wrong when the tide turns.

The numbers

2:47Here are the numbers. Our two megawatt demonstrator has been in the water since the ninth of May twenty twenty-four.

2:54Over its first eighteen months it delivered six thousand eight hundred, sorry, six thousand eight hundred and seventy megawatt-hours to the grid, at a capacity factor of thirty-eight percent, with ninety-three percent availability across two winters. The levelised cost of energy for that single unit is still ugly, and I will not pretend otherwise, at about a hundred and seventy-eight pounds per megawatt-hour.

3:20But the published learning rate for this sector is around fifteen percent per doubling, and our own model puts a one hundred megawatt array at about seventy-nine pounds by twenty thirty-three. Now, all of that hangs on the strike price, on the connection at Thurso, and on the price of steel, so do push on it, please.

Why anyone should care

3:40Why should anyone care, when offshore wind is cheaper today?

3:48Because a grid with a great deal of wind on it has a problem on a still, cold evening in January, and the tide does not check the weather forecast.

The funding and the plan

3:58We are raising forty-two million pounds to build the first thirty megawatts, with a final investment decision in the second quarter of twenty twenty-seven. The consents are in place. The supply chain is in Nigg, Arnish and Methil, in yards that really, know precisely how to build heavy things for the sea.

4:17My father built rigs in one of those yards, and he thinks I have gone soft, to be honest with you, because mine are smaller. He may have a point. But he also asked last week if there were any shares going. [chuckles]

Come north in March

4:31So I would ask you for one thing. Come north in March, stand on the cliff at Duncansby Head, and watch the water go past.

4:40Then tell me it is not worth catching. Thank you very much.