Electric City: the North makes its own arrangements

'Brora, Electric City'. It’s quite a claim for a little village on the east coast, isn’t it? But when you discover that it generates electricity from coal coming out of its own mine, you can understand why people are pleased with themselves. The applause greeting its new public electric lamps in 1913 celebrates an improvement on people’s own streets, regardless of how long other places have enjoyed it.

Not every community has a coal mine and an enterprise capable of supplying its neighbours, but near Melvich somebody finds another answer. A newspaper account from 1937 describes an aeroplane propeller outside a shed, connected through motor-car shafts and gearing to dynamos inside. The electricity lights a joiner’s shop, byres and barns, and provides power for machinery. Components built for quite different jobs are brought together to make the wind useful where people live and work.

I was staggered when I found that account, because here we are arguing about wind turbines in the northern landscape, while somebody within our own region has already recognised the opportunity decades earlier. They understand what electricity could do for them and work out how to produce it where it is needed. We soon appreciate our dependence when a power cut lasts for days, but these are people finding a way to obtain a supply in the first place, rather than waiting for someone else to bring it.

On Stroma, an island in the Pentland Firth between Caithness and Orkney, household wind generation also brings electric light into homes. But the island sits amongst some of the world’s fastest tidal currents, and being within sight of the mainland does not make supplying it straightforward. In the audio blogcast, we follow the islanders’ individual efforts and the difficulties of providing a communal supply, until a community surrounded by wind turns to gas for its lighting.

To learn more, listen to the blogcast or book one of our North Coast Explorer tours.