coe009_watts.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:25] Welcome back, everybody. We're so glad to have you listening again. Welcome, welcome Culture of Energy podcast. As you know, almost live coming out of the basement of Fondre Library, supported by the digital media comments and especially by Jane and Natalia, who I want to do another shout out to. And, of course, the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, also known as Sandy, who has supported this podcast all along, both spiritually and materially.

Speaker2: [00:00:59] That's right.

Speaker1: [00:01:00] So today we are going to be talking with a very, very interesting scholar and poet and ethnographer and thinker about science and technology studies, and her name is none other than Laura. What's so apt? And I say, if you're someone who's doing energy, humanities or energy and environmental social sciences, there is no better surname that you can have than what I know.

Speaker2: [00:01:28] And she works in Orkney, which is also known as the energy islands.

Speaker1: [00:01:33] Yeah, so and in some circles, the end of the world in some ways. So, you know, hit your maps. If you're wondering where Orkney is because this is a fascinating place, we're going to learn quite a bit more about it as an energy island, as and as a renewable powerhouse, but in a very experimental way and and very much focused on the power of the ocean, waves and wind,

Speaker2: [00:01:56] It was really amazing. I learned so much from this conversation about Orkney, but also just this idea that there's already this place in the world that is already modeled like 100 percent renewable energy

Speaker1: [00:02:09] Over the top. Beyond that, yeah, so much so that they actually have a dragon tail that winds its way into the ocean and is able to transmute power across the seas to another continent.

Speaker2: [00:02:25] And there are games. Game of Thrones references in this interview to

Speaker1: [00:02:28] Oh, I just think it's just waiting, not having been to Orkney, but having seen the images in her book, which is a beautiful object of of art in itself. Orkney is definitely next on the list, but it's a it's an interesting, desolate but beautiful landscape. And you can imagine she talks about dragon eggs and you can imagine them there.

Speaker2: [00:02:48] It's basically Game of Thrones meets renewable energy utopia.

Speaker1: [00:02:51] It's waiting to happen. It is definitely waiting to happen. Yeah. So Laura is someone who's been a poet for some time and identifies herself in that way and writes incredible poetry. And actually, she'll be doing her debut, at least in terms of cultures of energy. This will be the first time we will have had a reading of poetry on the podcast. And she also sees herself as a dream hacker, someone who has participated in forms of alien energy, someone who has not evolved but resurfaced the electric nemesis.

Speaker2: [00:03:34] That's very cool

Speaker1: [00:03:35] And has embodied and has found ways to embody her and personify her in different ways. And apparently, she roams the shores of Orkney right now as we speak.

Speaker2: [00:03:46] Yeah, but we can't spoil that.

Speaker1: [00:03:47] No, can't spoil it. Don't spoil it.

Speaker2: [00:03:49] But the other thing that's interesting about this week's episode is that this is the first week that we went on the road to record outside the studio. And we actually recorded this episode in St. Andrews, Scotland, where we were visiting as part of a whirlwind week long tour of the UK, visiting two energy conferences and doing a few other things to sing some old friends making some new ones. But anyway, it was exciting.

Speaker1: [00:04:14] Oh well, come on, Dominic. You can admit the truth. We were really there catching up on our

Speaker2: [00:04:19] Our golf games. Oh yes, that's right. Yeah, we're both very avid golfers. And so first

Speaker1: [00:04:25] Golf course in the

Speaker2: [00:04:26] World. St Andrews is a mecca for us, so we snuck out as often as we could to go golfing.

Speaker1: [00:04:32] This is a place where you can get literally a golden tee and where you see golf clubs sticking out of every possible flower pot.

Speaker2: [00:04:41] Just want to clarify I have never, ever been golfing, not once in my entire life.

Speaker1: [00:04:45] So I think I followed some like a grandpa or two around once on a field. It's not bad and you can see why golfing, you know, evolved in a place like Scotland because it's beautiful and lush and green, and they have the perfect rolling hills for it. The problem is when they migrated golf courses to places like Palm Springs and Southern California, which are not built for hosting, you know, ever lush green expanses of grass to hit a little ball across, actually.

Speaker2: [00:05:13] My grandfather actually hit me in the head with a golf ball once, not intentionally, but he was practicing chip shots out in the lawn and I was going running, collecting balls. I got hit in the head by a golf ball, so maybe that's part of the reason for my aversion to golf anyhow.

Speaker1: [00:05:26] Well, at least he didn't hit you at the club.

Speaker2: [00:05:28] Good, Munster. Yes, it could have been worse. It could have been worse anyway.

Speaker1: [00:05:31] So at St Andrews, you can walk along the beautiful three or so streets that are there. I mean, it's an incredibly beautiful, quaint place with lots of crackling and crackling gulls goals.

Speaker2: [00:05:46] Many you can run the Chariots of Fire beach while you home Vangelis to yourself, right?

Speaker1: [00:05:51] Or if you really want to challenge yourself instead of running the Chariots of Fire Beach, you can actually try and keep up with the quick pace of fit. English women

Speaker2: [00:06:01] Like Laura was like

Speaker1: [00:06:02] Laura Watts and Catherine Alexander, who moved twice the speed of any of those Chariots of Fire runners and as a final enticement to visit St Andrews and perhaps Orkney on the way over is that they have at a little tiny candy shop in the middle of town. Edible money so you can go get a ten pound note that is made out of candy paper. You can get an American one dollar bill that's made out of candy paper and you can actually eat money. Yeah. So for all of you out there who have just had that on your bucket list forever.

Speaker2: [00:06:40] Hungry anti-capitalists, you know, people who just reject monetary economies but also are hungry.

Speaker1: [00:06:45] Yeah, the world is yours in St

Speaker2: [00:06:48] Andrew's St Andrew's. Ok, with that. Laura, what's?

Speaker1: [00:07:12] So here we are in beautiful St. Andrews, Scotland, where there is a loud cacophony of seagulls out on the roofs every single morning, and this is not just your average cacophony of seagulls. This is a whole bramble like you're on an island of birds. It's like a bird reserve here. There's so much squawking and quacking going on, but it's a spectacularly stony and spectacularly wet and wonderful place, too.

Speaker2: [00:07:42] But we're in the comfort of beautiful five Kilmore Place, which is why you can't hear all that Seagulls squawking. We're in this well insulated room here. It's very comfy. It's very cozy. We want to thank the owners of this lovely bed and breakfast at five Kilmore Place, St Andrews.

Speaker1: [00:07:57] Shout out to Jackie,

Speaker2: [00:07:59] A shout out to Jackie for having given us her well-appointed and quiet lounge in which to do the first ever cultures of energy roadshow here. So let us introduce and welcome writer, poet and ethnographer Laura Watts. Laura, welcome.

Speaker3: [00:08:15] Thank you very much. So it's great to be here. It's lovely to be in St Andrews as well.

Speaker2: [00:08:20] We wanted to get as close as possible to the Orkneys to be able to interview you. So this is as close as we got. Turning it over to somebody.

Speaker1: [00:08:28] Right. So Laura, we know that you have just published or it's just been released. The first poetic primer on marine renewable energy, which has a lot of elements to it, just that even contained in the title itself. So the title of the book is Ebb and Flow In, and it's written by you and Alec Finlay and Alastair Peebles. And I'd love to ask you some questions about that book. What? What was the impetus for it? What inspired the three of you to collaborate together on the text? What is the content just to tell us everything about it? But before we do that, I want to let our listeners know a little bit about it by reading just a couple of lines from the foreword so that they have more context, too. So it says here that this primer on marine renewable energy in Orkney and the Nordic countries considers how, through both language and technology use is inflected with locality. And I think that's key use is inflected with locality. Orkney was part of the Viking world for 600 years and in its old Norse language of Norn tied the word tied to tidy shared a meaning with time Timmy. And this endures today. So there is so much fascinating potential in connection between tide and time, and you've brought it together in this kind of poetic collection, and we would love to hear a bit more about why ebb and flow in.

Speaker3: [00:10:04] That's an extraordinarily large question. The the book itself is part of an ongoing project of mine. Orkney has been my field site for, oh, seven or eight years. It's kind of my second home and I've been really interested in how the future gets imagined and made differently in different places. So how our imaginaries of the future affected by the landscape, the seascape and the places in which we live, and Orkney, which is on the far north east coast of Scotland. Just to describe it a little bit so well, describe Orkney. And then I'll tell you a little bit about the book because Orkney on the far north east coast. Some people might be familiar with John O'Groats, which is the far north east coast of mainland Scotland. You take the ferry over there to Orkney, which is an archipelago of islands. It's about 21000 people, 20 inhabited islands. And what's important to know about Orkney is that it's a place which is full of sea lochs and hills. It's relatively low lying and it's full of energy. It's full of energy. Because the wind almost never stops in the winter, they are sometimes closed schools because small children will get blown away and sometimes the mainland ferry stops. That means that the supermarket shelves are not filled. People have to reach into the chest freezer. It means the lights go out, the internet goes out. They know about energy.

Speaker3: [00:11:30] Everyone talks about energy every day on the street, all the time. Energy prices are very high. Fuel poverty is high. And but people know where their energy comes from, and that's one of the reasons why I'm there it is. They talk about themselves as energy islands, so it's one of the places. One of the reasons why I've been to Orkney is because of this sense in which the future gets imagined very different there, because their geography is specific and because the way they they live, their histories are very specific. So back to the book. As you as you said, I've this book is an unusual book. It's not. It's not intended to be an academic book, but it's based on ethnographic fieldwork, and the book is poetic. The book is ethnographic. The book has photographs, it is technical and it's imaginary. It brings all these things together, and the focus of the book is about marine energy. So I feel like the first thing I need to say about marine energy is to explain what on earth it is, because I'm sure many people listening will have no idea. And that's one of the things that makes it really exciting to work there. So marine energy is creating electricity from the power of the tides and the waves. There's lots of other forms of water energy you might have, but those are the two that's focused in Orkney

Speaker1: [00:12:45] And uses turbines in order to generate electricity. Is that

Speaker3: [00:12:49] Correct? Yes. Essentially you there's many, many different designs. So if you kind of imagine one of the designs, there's an underwater turbine, so imagine a wind turbine, but under the sea and imagine the tide passing through the wind turbine equivalent under the sea. And that's the way it turns. But you have other devices. There's wave energy devices. For example, Puello, which is a finished device, uses a gyroscope mechanism, so it floats on top of the waves and the waves make it roll around. And that gyroscope mechanism inside the device is what generates electricity. So there's a whole range of different forms and devices that are being tested in Orkney and Orkney has the world's first and longest running grid connected test site for full scale prototype devices of wave and tidal energy.

Speaker1: [00:13:38] And, you know, was another interesting thing about marine energy, especially with the turbine models, is that because the power that's generated is based on the kinetic energy of whatever's moving through it, and because water is so much heavier than wind that those, you know, those inverted wind turbines that we imagine in the waves are actually producing more. It's a more effective form of producing energy because the weight of the water is so much more powerful than than the weight of the wind. So there's a lot of really interesting potential out there.

Speaker3: [00:14:10] It's actually quite extraordinary. The the waters around Orkney, it's basically if you imagine the Atlantic Ocean coming from the West and the North Sea coming from the east, it's Orkney sited almost like the collision of these two seas. So it's a very, very high, energetic site, as they say. And actually, some of the sort of estimates are that the seas around Orkney could generate anything between two and four gigawatts of marine energy. Just I understand that's about either half or all of the houses in Scotland being powered just by the seas around Orkney, just by wave or tide power is an extra wow. So, you know, this is serious. And in fact, in some of the sort of drum rolling by the Scottish Government, it was described as the Saudi Arabia of marine power. So that's the kind of give you a sense of how significant it is. And that's why it's a site for the European Marine Energy Centre, which is one of the places where I've been doing fieldwork for the last seven or eight years. But the important thing to remember about Orkney is that it's not just the European Marine Energy Centre, which is kind of a particular organization, but it's all the other people around Orkney who are involved. There's something like, you know, 35 different companies in Orkney who are involved in marine energy. That's divers, that's mariners. Fishers are involved. Environmental consultancies, you know, it's people who run the bed and breakfasts. It's, you know, everyone's kind of involved. It's a communal endeavour.

Speaker1: [00:15:40] How many people live in the archipelago,

Speaker3: [00:15:42] So it's 21000 people in total, it's a growing population, but obviously the important thing to realize is it's out, it is at the edge. And I talk about that very specifically because it's the cutting edge for me, and there's a number of implications for that for what's happening in the archipelago around the generation of renewable energy. Because Orkney is not just a site for a test site for marine renewable energy, which is what we focus on in the book, but also for four reasons I'll take you to in a moment, we'll do a little tour of Orkney. It's also a place where they're generating over 100 percent of their own energy from renewable power, so they have wind turbines. Many of them community, are locally owned. They've got micro turbines. It's a site. It's a test site for the electricity grid. They've got grid batteries, all sorts of things which are only talked about as a future and other places are actually been happening in Orkney for many, many years. So some people listening might be surprised to know they've had what's equivalent to a smart grid, a registered power zone since 2006.

Speaker1: [00:16:46] That's impressive. I mean, one of the things that that you notice the minute that you look at the book is that the cover is this beautiful landscape, but it's not a landscape in the sense that it's more sky scape and seascape than it is land. But the land sort of creates these parallels or equivalencies with with the sea and the sky. So you get a sense that life on Orkney is very integrated with this, these larger sort of atmospheres and hydro spheres that it's part of. And then here in the corner, you have some kind of infrastructure. It's not quite clear exactly what it is, but it definitely looks like energetic infrastructure. Some kind of. It almost looks like an oil platform, except in miniature. But so I think what would be really interesting is to kind of take us on an energetic tour of Orkney or give us a walk around the island. For those of us, many of us who have never been there and may never get a chance to see this extraordinary place,

Speaker3: [00:17:49] So I'll be delighted. I often feel like I'm wearing the Orkney Tourist Board T-shirts. I do think it's an extraordinary place, so I'm kind of going to imagine I'm looking at the book cover here, which you just lovely described, and I'm going to go take you through the book cover. So I don't know if you've ever played the computer game Myst, but you kind of go into the book. So I've got the book open in front of me and it's got a full cover. And what you're looking through is, as you say, there's kind of extraordinary. You're actually looking over the wave test site for the European Marine Energy Centre, but what it looks like is a bay with fields, and it's almost like there's almost very little to see because of course, wave energy is underneath the sea and actually the electrical substation is buried into the side of the sandy cliffs. So it's covered in grass. And then we're looking out over over the sound, over the water to Hoi, which is the high island which is in the background, which is the the hills and the cliffs, and actually the cliffs that you can see on the on Hoy are some of the highest in the UK, and there's this extraordinary expanse of sky above. And in fact, I think there's a sort of something of a joke between me and my literary friends in Orkney is we often wonder if you could ever write about Orkney without talking about the sky because it's constantly reflected in the water, and it's almost impossible to take a bad photograph in Orkney. The sunsets are extraordinary. There's so much cloud, there's lots of sky. You know, it's a place where you often spend a lot of time talking in terribly romantic sentences about bruised sunsets and this kind of thing. It is an extraordinarily beautiful place

Speaker1: [00:19:29] To have a lot of people flocking there with their selfie sticks now.

Speaker3: [00:19:33] Yeah, the tricky thing is windy, so you've got to hang on to those sticks. So but as you say, what's interesting is that Orkney, although I've described this beautiful, you know, this feels there's kind of like little farmhouse. It's a technological landscape, and that's really crucial. And you can see here that it looks like it's just fields. But in the corner there, as you said, there's kind of like a little miniature looks like an oil platform. It's actually an installation platform for Oyster. So Aquamarine Oyster is a wave energy device, and the way it works is the clue is in the name. So you imagine an oyster and its base is on the seabed. And then the top part, the hinge, part of the oyster. Imagine an open oyster flaps in the waves as they go past, so the top part of the oyster flaps in the waves and that movement of that flap then pumps water up backwards and forwards along a pipe, which then turns a turbine on land. So again, another different device. But it's one of. I think it's about seven different devices at the wave energy test site, which is extraordinary, there are about 34 different open sea marine energy test sites around the world, but Orkney and the European Marine Energy Centre is unique because it has so many different devices. Rolls-royce has come here, voice has come here, altham, you know, big names are familiar to. People are coming here to test their marine energy devices. I'm getting sidetracked. It happens. So I was trying to explain about the extraordinary technological landscape because it seems very technologically look at it.

Speaker3: [00:21:04] There's very few trees because it's windy, but actually the landscape is full of archaeology, and that's technology. So archaeology is again a kind of natural thing. Archaeology from the you talked about the Vikings, there's Viking settlements. It goes further back into the Iron Age. It goes even further back. There's Bronze Age barrows, where there's a kiss with basically kind of no bodies and things in them. There's stone circles, more stone circles you can shake a stick at, and there's no Neolithic villages as a World Heritage Site here, where the ring of broken stone circles scarab Neolithic sentiment. Basically, you can go back to the Mesolithic. You can go back 6000 years of continuous habitation and technological remains. So marine energy is part of a continuum of technological existence and a relationship with making energy out of the land and making a living out of the landscape. So for me, that's a very important thing to remember is there's a long sense of the future because there's a long sense of the past. Mm-hmm. And part of that also comes through when you looking at the cover and I talked about how these beautiful islands in the distance, if you go to the far side of Hoy, there's an extraordinary beach. It's got bold. It's a Pebble beach, but the pebbles are the size of boulders. So imagine, you know, dragon eggs, these this is the kind of scale you've got pebbles, but they're actually the size of Dragon Age. I don't know what would happen if one basically cracked and you're going to

Speaker1: [00:22:41] Have Game of Thrones next after the selfie sticks come.

Speaker3: [00:22:45] Game of Thrones is the mole. Yeah, oh, you could. I sometimes imagine it might be something like Queen Alien Eggs, but there's

Speaker1: [00:22:54] A new series for

Speaker3: [00:22:55] Hbo. Yes, definitely. But on this beach there is a big cable and you can see it at low tide and you can see the cable that is the interconnected cable from Orkney to Mainland Scotland. Because Orkney is on the grid, and that's not an invisible thing. Everyone's very conscious of it because this cable is overheating because, as I said, the Orkney Islands are generating more than 100 percent of their energy from renewable sources. It's got to go somewhere, and if they can't use it all on the islands, it's got to go down the cable. The cable can't cope. It's a long standing problem with a lot of places in the UK and other countries around the world where the grid is at capacity because they're so good at generating renewable energy. And there's some major implications for this because as I said, a lot of the individual islands have their own locally owned or community owned wind turbines that generates revenue. That revenue is crucial for the islands to continue to develop to keep people living in the islands. That revenue is used for everything from putting together new ferries, slipways, building houses for people, insulating homes, you know, building museums, tourist facilities. So the revenue from turbines is absolutely crucial to the long term, continuing ongoing growth and prosperity of the islands. And that means that when the islands are at capacity, when the when the wind's blowing and the waves are up and everything's turning and there's too much energy there, smart grid switches off some of the wind turbines. And it's a real issue because if you switch off a wind turbine, you can't generate revenue from it and that has impacts on the community. So that's one of the things that I'm looking at is it was looking at living in a future smart grid environment. You know, Orkney is living in a future grid. It's got a living smart grid and you can see what the implications are when you start switching turbines on and off. And that, for me, is really important because it gives us a sense of what living in the future might be like.

Speaker2: [00:25:00] So I'm curious, Laura, first of all, what brought you to Orkney in the first place? And was it energy that drew you there? Or was energy something you discovered once you were there?

Speaker3: [00:25:11] So I came to Orkney because I've been doing loads of research with other high tech industries and their futures. I've been looking at mobile, telecoms and telecoms industry, and some of the audience might be familiar with the idea of ubiquity ambience that they're somehow everywhere you go in the world, they're supposed to be mobile phone. It's, you know, it's considered something that is everywhere available. And I was very fascinated by the fact that the industry was very locked into this particular future. And I wanted to find a place which defected and intervened and made that future, you know, unthinkable. And one of the things that happens in Orkney is you cannot think about universalism in Orkney and other places like that because the hills get in the way. The fact you have settlements distributed that mean that the, you know, the cost benefit analysis doesn't stack up. So I was interested in going to places where the imaginary of the future is actually very different. But of course, I wanted to go somewhere which had a very strong sense of its own future, and I'm very interested in how to reconceptualize what we, you know, what we think about when we talk about innovation and energy innovation and energy futures. And rather than thinking about places which are kind of all gleaming and glossy like Silicon Valley, but actually looking at very different places where they are building and living in an energy future. But it's not quite what you might imagine. It looks like it's built in different ways, but I think that makes it more exciting because it's more open minded in its ways. It imagines the future.

Speaker2: [00:26:40] Do you think that the UK is current sort of the dominant ways that the United Kingdom is thinking about energy transition and energy futures? Do you think that they're taking what's happening in Orkney sufficiently into account?

Speaker3: [00:26:56] The short answer is no.

Speaker2: [00:26:58] Ok, expand, please.

Speaker3: [00:26:59] Absolutely. So I mean, the UK, as some of your listeners might know, is a very complicated multiple place and Orkney is closer to Norway and the Arctic Circle than it is to London, where energy policy is largely made. This has a number of interesting effects, so I'll give you a recent example. The government in Westminster and recently released a report by the National Infrastructure Commission who are very concerned about upgrading the electricity grid. This is a big issue for lots of people. I know it's a huge issue in the states, for example. What are we going to do to keep the lights on as simple as that? And in their reports, a recent report came out in March. So it's just a few weeks ago they said, right, we've got to do three things. We've got to increase interconnection to other countries, other grids in order to pull in energy from places which have high levels of renewable energy that we can then buy in. Secondly, we need to have smart grids, in essence, active local management, flexible management. And thirdly, we need grid batteries. So these are the three recommendations that the UK government report made, and it suggested to go look in New Zealand, for example, to look at how it does active management and to various other locations, then completely overlook the fact that Orkney is already living in the future that it describes, which is a real shame because of the fact that, for example, just to take those those three specific cases, just so your everyone listening has some idea that I'm talking quite empirically.

Speaker3: [00:28:38] Firstly, with respect to the interconnector, the the imaginary that the government has and many other places, particularly around Europe, has, is to go and build a huge cable across the North Sea to either Iceland or Norway, which both have large amounts of renewable energy. And it could, for example, invest in upgrading the cable to Orkney, which has huge amounts of renewable energy. As I've just said and the second example, there's the active network management system smart grid alive and well, as I just said to you so many since 2006. And then thirdly, grid battery, the UK's first national grid battery, has been operating in Orkney. I think I think about 2013, so for some time. So it's frustrating that actually there's an awful lot of tests. Orkney is a living laboratory, as they describe it, like many other places, and there's a lot of things that people I think could learn from and understand. Not it's not just the technical, it's the fact that the people and the and the technology are integrated and bound together. You know, I talked about the community wind turbines. That's part of the story.

Speaker1: [00:29:45] I remember you saying something interesting earlier about Orkney and people who live on Orkney sort of refusing the the trappings or the title of community. And and I thought that that refusal was very provocative as someone who often struggles with the concept of community and its over application. In so many cases, it's become one of these empty signifiers. That kind of means nothing and everything all at once. And it's just so it's been so abstracted that it doesn't seem to tell us anything useful. And so I loved it. When you said that people on Orkney, Orkney Islands, can I say that that or acadians even better? You know that they kind of struggle with this term community. They know how to deploy it when they need to or want to in certain political contexts, I suppose. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the rub there with the question of community?

Speaker3: [00:30:47] Absolutely. It was something that was made really clear to me because the example that's often talked about is there is a wind turbine on Burry, one of the islands, which in some stories is the Scotland's first community wind turbine. And in other versions of that, that story of the Burry wind turbine is it's a locally owned wind turbine that's I think it's about 10 people invested in. So it's an investment, a local investment, and that's very important. Those two different stories because in Burry, one of the islands but also other islands, has a, you know, a small number of people. We're talking a few hundred people and Orkney is an egalitarian place and you have to be you have to work together. And that means that you have to be very careful about ideas of exclusion. And the problem is that the word community contains all this baggage about everybody being inclusive. But when you live on an island or in a small community, you know that that is actually almost impossible. You're never going to get someone once said to me, you are never going to get everyone to agree unless it's something that threatens the whole islands. And it's extremely rare. So the work, a number of people said to me, Look, we can't use the word community because we know that brings with it the idea that we're somehow supposed to. If we're a community development trust, we're supposed to be speaking for everyone and we can't do that. That's impossible. There's always going to be somebody who disagrees quite legitimately. So for one of the effects of that is the development trusts are often called development trusts.

Speaker3: [00:32:23] The word community is mobilized, as you say, strategically, politically, obviously, they can do work to get access to funding. But one of the things as two things that happened is the first thing that's quite important is that there is a um, there's a kind of silencing effect so that one of the ways that you know, people figure out how to get on with each other is you tend not to try and annoy the person who is the only plumber on the island because you might need him, right? So people tend to find ways to kind of, you know, well, I might not like that person, but I'm not going to fall out with them. So there's a lot of very careful, subtle kind of, you know, that's how you build relationships with people. It's very, very practical. So I think that's for me really kind of crucial as to understand that this is not. And there's often, particularly if you've grown up, maybe in a more urban environment and there's a there's an idea that somehow if you were living on an island, everyone's somehow nicer or somehow it's all happy rural families. If you want to escape people go and live in a city because if you live in a small group of people, you have to work really hard continually to get on with people to accept the fact you all got differences and you're not going to agree. In fact, while the Chapin Z Community Development Trust or the islands there took 10 years to agree on putting up a wind turbine, that's how long it takes to reach some kind of settlement.

Speaker1: [00:33:47] Mm hmm. And one of the things I think is very interesting here is that with the question of community, so or guardians are are questioning that that concept of community and actually what they're doing is surfacing the fact they're making transparent. The fact that there is no such thing or it's not easily achieved that you can sort of speak for everyone. And what I think is important here and that I've learned more about now just listening to your response is that Orkney is not just a kind of test island for energy futures in a technical sense, but it's a test island for energy futures in a social sense because people are needing to learn how to work things out in subtle ways, as you say, in collective ways. And I think when we think about the work, for example, of Herman Sheer, the German politician and thinker and author, he had very, very strong views about the importance of having shorter supply chains for energy and making renewable energy. Absolutely. Central solar was his was his preferred renewable energy. But what was very important was to downscale the size of the grid or to do away with it altogether and make very localized forms of energy that people could access directly. But what he also believed and wrote about was that that would change the social formation in which we live, that changing our forms of energy, making them closer to home actually transform the way we interrelate with each other. So I think that's another really interesting thing that appears to be happening in some ways on Orkney. Of course, it has its own special history.

Speaker2: [00:35:25] Yeah, if I could just tag on one one extra thing to that question, I'm really moved and fascinated by this image of the overheating interconnecting wire disappearing past the dragon eggs heading south to the rest of the United Kingdom. And I'm wondering thinking about that sort of as a metaphor, how the acadians feel about this. Do they do the do they want to that grid to exist? Does that bring them closer to the UK? Or is it sort of there as a kind of throbbing sign of alienation that, you know, still, we're not getting respect. We're sort of really left out here by ourselves, and maybe we'd be better off by ourselves in some way.

Speaker3: [00:36:05] Well, firstly, I would never try and speak for acadians and any kind of general sense because I'm sure they'll be listening to this. And there'll be some people agree and some people go, Goodness, what is she talking about? Because that's the nature, right? And it's and I would always be really clear that I spent most of my time in one particular town in Orkney and Stromness, where a large number of renewable energy companies are located. It's got a very specific it's its own community, and that means that I know lots of people there, but no less about what's happening in some of the other islands. So I'm, you know, it's it's a community, location, culture all the way down. It's fractal, right? But respect aspect of the cable. The stories I've heard about the cable are many. I think Orkney Orkney has always been a very place. The stories about opening the experience I've had is it's very open to people coming into the islands. Its whole history, its whole history and the way it talks itself about itself is that everyone is an income now. Whether they came with, you know, the Vikings, whether they came, you know, with the picks before that, whether they kind of came on a boat. There's the histories of the Hudson Bay Company, which had offices in Orkney, so there's lots of connections across to Canada. So this Orkney is not a place which is about exclusions or in that sense, it, you know, it enjoys the bringing people to the islands.

Speaker3: [00:37:27] That's a very important part of it. So I think that's very. The Orkney, the Orkney fable as Edwin Muir, one of the writers and poets in Orkney, talked about the fable and the story of Orkney, and the fable is this mythical version of Orkney as a whole. So lots of people talk about Orkney and are we? And that does exist, but it's a kind of fable for Orkney that exists on top of all the difficulties and the disagreements of the story of Orkney. So holding those two together is very important. So one of the fables that exist about the cable would be that it's overheating, and that's in a way, a demonstration of the ongoing resistance by, you know, sort of government and policy. We imagine a future energy, which somehow it all seems to exclude all Orkney over overlook them. And that's a big issue. When you see maps of the UK. Sometimes Orkney is completely and Shetland, for example, not on the map of the UK. They occasionally jokingly call themselves the inset isles because they're in a little box on the map that's inset into the map. So that's kind of degree of state, you know? So they want the connection, of course, and you know, they're very much connected. But they're also aware that the limitation that overheating cable is and I don't want to call it a symbol because it has practical problems.

Speaker3: [00:38:45] I already talked about the fact that it switches off community wind turbines. It's got big implications, potentially for the growing global marine energy. You have to remember in Orkney, we've got ministers from China, from Taiwan, from Chile, from Brazil. There's people, you know, every TV radio crew across the world, National Geographic, CDF. Everyone comes to Orkney to look at the marine energy because it is a global center, so that cable is symbolic of a of an oversight or more than an oversight, a really frustrating absence that's going on in energy policy in the UK around this new energy industry. Marine energy, it's being commercialised in in Orkney, and yet it's not really on the energy map. Despite, as I said, the extraordinary amount of power that is in the waves and tides. So there's there's global implications this cable. There's implications for the communities in terms of wind turbines, but there's also, you know, practical implications and concerns about jobs. So I talked about all the different companies involved. You know, it's about maintaining your own wind turbines, maintaining your marine energy industry. You know, people visit the islands, they spend money there. You know, there's some very practical concerns and that that cable is, you know, has a lot of practical implications, the fact that it's overheating. So it's a symbolic of some of the ways also in which the the energy market, as is imagined to somehow provide everything fails in many particular occasions, including Orkney.

Speaker2: [00:40:11] So to go back to Semenya's point before, do you think people, it's sort of about the question about grid, right? I mean, to what extent are they invested in grid? To what extent is this sort of Syrian utopia of small, local, you know, sort of relatively short supply chain uses of energy? Actually what's being embraced because it sounds a bit from what you're just saying, as though the global is still very much part of their understanding of what they're doing.

Speaker3: [00:40:37] So question around, let me kind of translate. You're asking about their relationship with the grid? That sort of.

Speaker1: [00:40:47] Well, maybe, maybe it's a question as to whether or Kadian see themselves as an autonomous unit in some ways in terms of their energy production and consumption or their own mini grid, if you will. I suppose that they're all interconnected and gritted in Orkney to some degree, or whether the more powerful and salient connector or gratification is, in fact, that cable that that throbbing dragon tail.

Speaker3: [00:41:17] I think for me, the useful imaginary that I've been working with is the idea of the Orkney Electron. So one of the Orkney is a big farming community. There's a reason why I'm now going from talking about electrons to talking about farms because there were there's a big brand called Orkney Gold Beef. So they're very proud of their beef, very proud of, you know, the the meat that comes from Orkney. It's very high quality, but it's very much comes from Orkney. And in a way, when I heard lots of people talking about their electricity, there's the same sense of the electricity that if they make it in Orkney, it's used in Orkney. So I kind of talked a lot about the idea of the Orkney Electron. This and technically those who have a physics background like me will all kind of go well. Of course, you can't tell the difference between different electrons, but there's a feeling about electricity that's made in Orkney is different, and that's really important because there's a desire then for that to be exported in the same way you export your meat, but also to use it locally. And it has a certain kind of quality. And the Orkney Electron has the landscape built in. It's got the wind, it's got the waves, it's got the tides, it's got the people, the Orkney electron content. The kind of, you know, in essence of what war can be is and then is possible then to the export that. So in a sense, for me, the opening electron, although no one's ever talked about it and was told me about the opening electron, but that's how I experience the electricity in.

Speaker3: [00:42:42] And that seems to me, you know, one of the kind of fun things. But I think most crucially, the feeling that I hear from Orkney people that I talk to is a sense of self-determination, and you have to be if you're being forgotten by government, which is what is happening so much of the time or overlooked, then you can't just kind of hope that somehow government will notice you one day. You have to be self-determined. You're this is about survival of the islands. There's enormous centralizing forces going on that is trying to it's it's makes it difficult often to live in the islands. We know people leave remote or islands, move to centres, population centers, young people move away from the islands to go to university, bring them back. These are issues that are many, many places around the world and Orkney experiences and too. So you have to think about ways. How are we going to be self-determined? How are we going to make our own future for the next 6000 years? How are we still going to be here? And energy, because it's talked about all the time is one of the ways of imagining what Orkney is going to be 6000 years from now. It's going to be a place that has its own energy, where there's still potentially going to be farming, where they might have marine energy turbines. But then there's questions of how do we keep hold our energy? How do we make what's happening here? Stay here so that we can, you know, retain jobs and have new industries and keep going.

Speaker1: [00:44:09] So we go from the Orkney Electron, which I I really want to hold. As impossible as that is, I would like to encounter that electron, especially with the little trademark on its rear end. Like the beef.

Speaker3: [00:44:22] Yeah, we actually did with Alastair Peebles, who is one of the authors in the book. He's a poet and photographer and artist. We talked about creating tea towels, so you have details in America. Ok. All right. So the kind of cloths used to dry dishes with and you often listen things that you often buy in tourist shops, so you have them printed as kind of like sort of a symbols and memories of a place. And we were going to create Orkney and Orkney gold electron tea towels for for tourists to take away. So we had this imagined idea for the way you could basically brand, you know, you have this idea of the Orkney gold beef. As a brand, you could create branded Orkney gold electrons.

Speaker1: [00:45:04] That sounds great. I'd be willing to buy that tea towel and give it to all my friends. So but the Orkney Electron brings us then to the electric nemesis. Tell us about that.

Speaker3: [00:45:17] So the electric nemesis, she's not in the book, but I have been performing her for about six months now. Some people may not know that Mary Shelley, when she wrote her story, Famous Story of Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the monster who is unnamed in the book, he created the first monster, as many people remember what they might not remember as he created a companion monster. And if you want to go back to the book, you'll find out that the companion monster, the female companion, was made in Orkney. Wow. So we have wandering around in the storms and the graveyards and the beaches and in the winds of Orkney along the cliff tops and abandoned monster, a female monster, the Victor Frankenstein created. And as you may or may not know, the monster that Frankenstein created is got long and extensive roots in particularly science studies where I come from, but also anthropology. There's been lots of talk about monsters. I draw a lot on Donna Hathaway's work and brutal at all talks about Victor Frankenstein monster. You know, monsters do a lot of work for us. They're mixtures, dangerous mixtures, but also, I think, important mixtures. So doing work in Orkney, I realize I have a companion on my journey, a companion made out of electricity. She was born out of electricity and she was abandoned by Victor out of hubris. And one of the things I realized in a lot of my work is that all of the stories about electricity, the big universalized stories often told by governments are full of hubris.

Speaker3: [00:47:08] They're full of abandoned prototypes like the ones that I just talked about in Orkney that have been going for years and aren't included in the government reports. There's lots of exponential graphs which show some kind of growth of any kind of value product you might imagine that's going to go infinitely up into the future. There's enormous amounts of hubris in electricity markets. So I realized that there was wandering around for me in the landscape, in the hills and on the moors and in the peat and around the stone circles of Orkney. This companion creature borne of electricity tricity, who was going to be avenging hubris and some of your listeners may know that Mary Shelley called her book The Modern Prometheus. Based on the Greek mythology, Prometheus is the is the titan god who gives life to the fires. Victor Frankenstein gives life through the fires of electricity and the Greek goddess who Avengers hubris is nemesis. So, of course, I realized that the companion creature who walked to me in Orkney who can guide me and pay attention to hubris is the electric nemesis. So I've been performing stories by higher and speaking as her in a number of academic conferences and events. And I also have employed a graphic artist who's been drawing her as she kind of walks around the landscape. So she's a figure who's not in this book, but it's actually going to be appearing in my next book.

Speaker1: [00:48:36] She sounds. I can't wait to meet her.

Speaker2: [00:48:38] Sent a tingle up my spine. My boy.

Speaker1: [00:48:40] I want to know what color she is to, but don't, don't spoil it. So we wanted to close. I think with your doing a reading of one of your poems and I'll let you introduce it. But I think it'd be wonderful to be able to hear a poem read by the the poet herself and absolutely a real treat for our listeners, because this will be actually the first time we've had a poetry reading or even a poem on the podcast.

Speaker2: [00:49:06] It's an afternoon of many firsts for us,

Speaker3: [00:49:09] So I just want to say a little bit about the book and why I'm reading and what the poem is about. So the book is a collaboration with artist and poet Alec Finley and also a list of people. So I mentioned it's full of photographs so people can see marine energy devices. But for me, as an academic and right, I'm interested in how our writing apparatus that we use creates worlds and therefore the different right ways that we write can create different worlds. So for me, the choice of writing and poetry is both one letting chance, but also can make worlds differently. And that for me, it's a methodological piece of work as well. So in the book that we've got lots of different poems by Alec, by myself, by Alistair, and we're playing a lot with language. As you said, the fact that Orkney was part of the North Viking world for six hundred years, it's old language contains a lot of Norse words, so some of that going on in the book. But I've also taken all my eight years of ethnography and discussions I've had with lots of people there. And as many of your readers may know when you're listening to people talk, when you're doing field fieldwork, you hear poetry in their language, people speak in a rhythm, and that's something that also we've included in the book as sort of some of the not just making quotes but making present the rhythm of people's language.

Speaker3: [00:50:38] So what I wanted to do today is is actually read something that's a third part of the book, which is a oral story that actually we compose as part of the Alien Energy Project at the IT University of Copenhagen, and I was interested in trying to work with the other myths. The logical characters I talked about the electric nemesis and she sort of, you know, lives in Orkney for me, but there's older stories of lots of different mythical figures creatures who live under the hill. Orkney has a whole mythology of sort of, yes, magical creatures, fairy tale creatures, and they're very much kind of alive. You know, people talk about them jokingly. So what I did was I used those creatures and they wove them because they inhabit the landscape and the seas of Orkney. And I wanted to write a poem about the energy in the seas and lands of Orkney. It felt to me that they ought to be a creature that was born of these particular magical creatures that inhabit around Orkney and how she might in some way be bound up with the energies and be a kind of a figure to bring together the energies and the mythology. So through that, we created an oral story and it's called the Draw Key's tale. It's an origin myth for wave energy. It was originally composed at a workshop in Iceland as an oral story, but oral stories change into many different forms as they get past and from person to person.

Speaker3: [00:52:09] And I've now written this down as a poem, so this is in some ways fixed it into a poem. But it also I passed it on to storytellers in Orkney as well, and it's going to be passing on in storytelling form two. But this is going to be an extract of the poem called The Drag His Tale. Perhaps, you know, of the sea creatures, the silky silver skinned seals who turn at the touch of land into beautiful men and women shapeshifters who transform themselves from seal to Homo sapiens as they cross from sea to sand. And perhaps you know of the draw or trial, trickster folk, wily and wayward, who live under the mounds of the dead with the soil and the peat, they are wise folk as old as fossil fuel filled with ancient energy. In a past that is yet to come. A drought and a sell qui met on a rocky beach in the far north of the world. They walked a while and fell in love as happens and had a daughter. Our lovely and lonely girl, the only one of her kind, a drowsy. Half bright, silky shapeshifter, half dark drama with ancient power. This drought. She had pearlescent skin that glowed in the sea dark.

Speaker3: [00:53:40] She had steel strong fins that whipped up the waves, a creature of the underworld like her father, a creature of sea energy like her mother. She swam fast and fierce, slicing the sea into sputum and the waves into wild high water. She swam alone, though, always singing long, sad songs. One day on the sea, there was an Icelandic fishing boat full of scientists. They heard her on their hydrophone, saw her power on their wave oscilloscope. They wanted that power for the world has need of sea energy. They followed her song and they waited ready with a big hook. The drowsy swam close within her wave storm. The boat tossed and almost turned over close as she swam. And then there was a hook about her neck, almost pulling it clean off thump. She went like a whale on the deck. They kept her in the ship's hold in a perspex tank. The scientists prodded and probed process data and try to determine how she made her way power. But the drought key was still. Silent, her wave power gone. And if you want to find out more about what happens to the Iraqi, then please get hold of a copy of the book. You can get it from Amazon.co.uk or you can go to my website at Sand 14 one four. Oh, please drop me an email. I'd love to talk to more about people about this work.

Speaker1: [00:55:28] Do you want to leave your email here?

Speaker3: [00:55:30] Yes. So I'm very interested to hear people's stories, their own poems, their own thoughts about different places at the edge, and they can email me at. If you get, as I said, go to my website or my email address. Is La U.W. Aptitudes OK?

Speaker2: [00:55:49] Ok, that's terrific. Laura Watts, thank you so much for four for talking with us, for sharing this amazing work, which I have to say because I just it's very moving and I love the way you're creating in part mythologies and cosmologists. For that, we need to have to get to the world we want to be in the future, right? You know, it's beautiful, but it's been so wonderful having you here on the Cultures of Energy podcast, and we hope we will be in touch for many years to come and hear more stories and poems and songs as we go along

Speaker1: [00:56:21] And made the Cherokee bring you over to North America one day.

Speaker3: [00:56:24] I look forward to bring the drowsy and the electric nemesis with me.

Speaker2: [00:56:28] Excellent. Take care. Thanks. Bye bye.