Blog: The reach of the media
Neil Kermode’s thoughts on EMEC’s local and international appeal:
On Monday last week Jenny Hill of the BBC visited EMEC and we shot an interview in the Operations Room in the Old Academy office. The piece, for BBC Breakfast, was broadcast on Thursday 5th September at 06:19 GMT and within 10 minutes we had received comment from London. By the end of the day people had been in touch from as far away as Peru.
The feature was aired on World Energy Day when BBC Five Live was running the station on renewables for the day. This led to a bit of a media feeding frenzy on the story with the interview also being used up by Radios 2, 4 and 5.
So courtesy of the reach of the BBC, the pioneering work being done in Orkney here at EMEC, by our wave and tidal energy clients (featured were Seatricity, Pelamis Wave Power and Scotrenewables) and within the local supply chain, had beamed around the world.
Later in the week EMEC featured in the Orkney International Science Festival when its de-facto ‘Annual Report’ on marine renewables in Orkney was made. EMEC has been asked every year for the last 6 or 7 to do a lecture and these have been well received. And as the understanding of the audience has grown, their interest has shifted to the progress taking place in the industry, rather than the basics.
Consequently this year’s session, introduced by Craig MacInnes of the Orkney Renewable Energy Forum saw a selection of developers, consultants and SSE (as the utility & leading project developer) join me to report on the myriad of projects and activity that have spun out in Orkney around the work at EMEC.
Although the one hour session had to be something of a gallop through activity, the feedback received was that people appreciated the update on the progress being made. From an initial set of experiments on EMEC’s test sites, we have witnessed a series of business decisions and investments and successful operations over the past decade that will lead to commercial harvesting of energy from the sea.
It really was marvellous to hear of progress on so many fronts and at so many levels delivered to an interested and knowledgeable audience.
So the task now is to see if we can generate the same level of familiarity with marine renewables that we saw in the audience in Kirkwall at the Science Festival in the wider audience that heard about the work through the BBC. The Orkney experience suggests that familiarity breeds further interest. This really does seem to be the time to make sure that this thirst for information is catered for.
The BBC report is available to view on the BBC website.
