by Kevin MacNeil
Winning entry of the Energy Stories Competition, 2026.
They put the battery in the old fish plant, its windows broken to the harbour where gulls still came, out of habit more than hope.
It arrived in sections, wrapped tight, already humming. A man said it would hold the wind. No one laughed.
The wind wasn’t something you held here.
Still, they bolted the thing together.
Calum remembered his grandmother trimming lamp wicks with small scissors.
“Waste nothing,” she’d say. “It comes from somewhere.”
Paraffin, then.
Now light came from a switch. No story attached.
The battery sat where the gutting tables had been, a long dark spine, lights moving along it.
Màiri, the engineer, pointed at a bright screen.
“When there’s too much wind,” she said, “we store it, use it later. Keep it local.”
As if there could be too much.
The first storm came hard. The turbines turned slow and steady, taking it cleanly.
Inside, the battery made a low sound you felt in your teeth.
That night the lights didn’t flicker once.
“It’s holding,” someone said in the shop the next day.
They didn’t say what.
There had been other holdings. Peat cut from the moor, stacked and dried, the slow release of summer in winter rooms. Diesel in the tanks down by the pier, ferried in, ferried out. Before that, things taken from further away, from animals that swam in colder seas, from forests that did not belong to them.
They tried a scheme in February. Too much wind, not enough use. The app showed green.
Available.
They opened the hall, turned the heat high. Soup appeared. People stayed longer than they meant to.
When there was excess power, two boys ran old computers in the back room, feeding them data about the dunes, where the edge might give.
An older woman held her hands to the radiator.
“Feels like it costs nothing,” she said.
“It costs,” Calum said. “We just don’t see it.”
Meetings followed. New cables. Export. Scale.
Màiri argued against expansion.
“You can’t run a place at full all the time,” she said. “It breaks.”
“Breaks what?”
She didn’t answer.
One evening, the wind stopped.
The turbines stilled. The sea went flat.
In the plant, the pattern of lights shifted. The battery gave back what it had taken.
The village drew from it. Kettles. Heaters. Screens.
Borrowings.
At the harbour, without wind, you could hear everything else: ropes, a radio, someone moving behind a door.
Calum thought of everything as a chain. Sun to grass. Grass to animal. Old forests to coal. Wind to wire.
Always something taken. Always something carried forward.
Not always returned.
By morning, the wind came back, ordinary as breath. The blades turned again.
In his kitchen, Calum flicked a switch. The lightbulb glowed, held.
Aye, it came from somewhere. He put his hand to the light, watching it settle along the lines of his skin.
Outside, gulls stood along the roof of the plant, shifting their weight, as if testing what would hold.
Energy Stories
Energy Stories is a funded pilot study in association with the University of Strathclyde, the University of Stirling and the University of Glasgow for the Scottish Research Alliance for Energy, Homes and Livelihoods (SRAEHL).