Shetland, a group of islands off the coast of Scotland, is taking advantage of being the windiest place in the UK by using this natural resource to create energy, and will soon have the most productive onshore wind farm in the country.
Viking Energy’s 103 turbine wind farm, led by SSE Renewables, has been developing for over a decade. Hoping to begin operations on the central mainland in 2024, it will be the UK’s largest onshore site by output, with a 443MW capacity.
“It leaves Shetland ahead of the curve in terms of the transition to net zero,” Aaron Priest, stakeholder manager for SSE tells Euronews Green. “Wider events have caught up with things, and people now realise the imperative for Shetland to diversify.”
Shetland, and other areas in the wind-battered North Sea are of increasing importance for both the EU’s energy and climate security, thanks to its abundance of both clean and dirty resources.
The large Viking development in the centre of the mainland has catalysed a broader transition throughout the islands.
ORION (opportunity for renewable integration with offshore networks) is a council-run project, alongside Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE), Scotland’s Net Zero Technology Centre, and the University of Strathclyde, which aims to create a clean energy network. For the first time, an undersea cable will connect Shetland to the UK mainland, with a 600MW interconnector transferring Viking’s colossal wind power to the national grid.
Because of its history of almost 50 years of extracting and exporting oil and gas, Shetland has infrastructure which can be repurposed. If all goes according to plan, many of the pipelines, ports and tanker jetties that facilitated the syphoning of oil and gas will now be filled with green hydrogen, produced when water is split using renewable energy such as wind power.
Shetland’s electricity usage is well below the capacity of Viking alone. Using an electrolyser to channel this excess into hydrogen could decarbonise Shetland’s cars, buses and inter-island ferries.
“Another thing we’re trying to do is not tread on oil and gas,” says Thomson. “We want to maximise the benefit to oil and gas, work them both in parallel, then obviously oil and gas will fade and we can ramp up the clean fuel route.”
“One thing about oil and gas, which we’re trying to avoid with hydrogen, [is that] there’s no refinery up in Shetland,” says Thomson. Oil is sent to the Scottish mainland before returning as a usable fuel. With hydrogen, “we’re trying to produce it locally. And then it can come straight out the terminal, into somebody’s car, hopefully at a more affordable price.”
As always, the project faces challenges such as the technicalities of floating wind farms in fierce seas, to addressing the fishing industry’s concerns about these offshore sites. Some residents are also concerned about the scale of Viking, and its impact on Shetland’s wild landscape that draws tourists.
