Meet the Highland wind power pioneers with no energy bills

Two world wars had depleted it of its youth. Those left behind had beautiful scenery but yearned for better infrastructure, electricity, proper lights.

By the early 1960s, they too were gone.

The simple life that locals had become tired of was precisely what had attracted the young Hugh in his search for an off-grid kind of life.

Wind power pioneer Hugh Piggott repairs one of his early windmills (Image: Hugh Piggott)

A small community of similarly minded folks had also settled in Scoraig, and he would bring a particular skill: Cambridge University educated with a background in maths and physics, he was about to become Scotland’s wind power pioneer.

Today, largely thanks to Hugh, Scoraig’s 70 or so residents are in the enviable position of never having to fear the electricity bill: they rely on wind and solar power for their energy needs, topped up when there’s really no alternative using wood, bottled gas and oil.

But that’s few and far between, says Hugh, pointing out that his 20-year-old bungalow has been so efficiently insulated and heated using hot water powered by his renewables system, that even in the depths of winter there’s no real need to resort to wood, coal or any other heating source.

Indeed, he can usually comfortably run all the electrical goods he needs, cost free.

“I have never had an electricity bill since I lived here and that’s 50 years ago,” he says. “I have all the mod cons; I have a dishwasher, all the normal appliances and they work great.

Scoraig wind power pioneer Hugh Piggott working on one of his windmills (Image: Hugh Piggott)

“We have ample electricity most of the time.

“And, if we run a bit low, and we have the choice then of becoming very spartan with our usage or using generators to make up the difference and provide continuity.”

Edinburgh-born Hugh was in his early 20s when he arrived at Scoraig. The dream was to be self-sufficient however, the reality was long, dark winters lit by oil lamps, it was cold, everything took much longer to do, and folk were turning to costly, noisy and dirty oil generators.

Hugh and a few others had plans for a more efficient option. What if they could catch the breeze – of which there was plenty - to turn a windmill that would make power to switch on the lights?

He set about building a series of prototype turbines using scrap materials, much of them retrieved from the dump at Inverness. His first employed a bicycle hub dynamo. It was noisy and not very effective, but it was a start.

After a year of tinkering, he produced his first small operational and reliable wind turbine: it wasn’t exactly instant electricity, he had to use a wheelbarrow piled with car batteries which he’d push to the site, charge the batteries, then return home to make use of the power.

Hugh Piggott works on one of his early windmills (Image: Hugh Piggott)

“At the beginning we were very limited because the wind turbines were very small and didn’t work well in low winds,” he recalls.

But soon windmills were popping up around the Scoraig community, and Hugh was on a mission to perfect a domestic windmill that produced reliable power and, most importantly, find a means of storing it.

Hugh Piggott carries out maintenance on one of his Scoraig windmills (Image: Hugh Piggott)

As luck had it, BT was modernising telephone exchanges at the time and he was able to buy high-quality storage batteries at low prices. Soon, the number of wind turbines dotted around the community grew from a handful to more than 30.

Hugh went on to set up Scoraig Wind Electric and become recognised as an authority on the technology long before wind farms became a feature of the Scottish landscape.

He has advised individuals and off-grid communities at home and abroad on how to develop their own self-sufficient renewables schemes, shared his knowledge in books and papers, while his ‘how to build a windmill’ courses attract people from around the world.

They are shown how to make the wood blades, weld the steel frame and fit the electrical elements including permanent magnets. A basic windmill – enough to power basic lights, a computer and television - might take a month to construct and cost around £300, with batteries and inverters costing extra but small price to pay for otherwise ‘free’ energy.

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These days, the systems he put in place around Scoraig are still doing their job even if maintaining them is almost a full time job.

One issue is vegetation – trees have sprouted interfering with how much wind reaches some turbines, while shifting weather patterns means wind direction is less reliable than it once was.

Wind energy pioneer Hugh Piggott used scrap parts to build his early windmills (Image: Hugh Piggott)

“I love the windmills to bits but they are pretty unreliable,” he concedes. “Big turbines seem to be pretty good in terms of 2reliability and producing cost effective energy22 but on a smaller scale because of all the moving parts and because the wind is always changing, they always seem to go wrong.

“Wind and solar are wonderful, but they are natural resources and incredibly patchy,” he continues.

“It’s there 90% of the time, but we have to live with that slight uncertainty and have the ability to respond in whatever way we need to, whether that’s economising or running a diesel generator or using other sources.”

Today, the windmills around Scoraig vary from around one metre in diameter to five metres, producing between 100 watts up to 6kW.

And was a scrapyard system is far more sophisticated: Scoraig homes like Hugh’s also have solar panels, there are large batteries for storage, volt meters in homes so users can keep watch on their usage.

Scoraig's windmills and solar system provide locals' energy needs (Image: Hugh Piggott)

Each home is self-sufficient, with year-round energy needs - including greenhouses - almost entirely served by renewable energy.

“In December and January when we don’t get much solar, the winter wind comes into its own,” he adds. “But like all natural resources it’s also not 100% reliable, you have to harvest when it’s there and have a flexible system that can adapt,” he adds.

“A lot of living with renewable energy is about using the opportunities that present themselves.”

A greenhouse powered by wind and solar in Scoraig. (Image: Getty)

Cathy Dagg arrived at Scoraig in the early 1980s with experience of living off-grid: “I was a bit of a hippy,” she says, “I lived in a tepee in Balquidder in the 1970s where all we had were candles.

“A couple of people in Scoraig were experimenting with wind power when I arrived, and we built them using whatever we could get like old dynamos from tractors and bits of old washing machines.

“I started off with a 12-volt system which was enough to give me a few lights and a radio.

“I liked it, it was easy to fix. There were no computer parts, no inverters or diodes and things I didn’t understand.

“If it went wrong, I’d tweak this, turned up that and rubbed the connectors together and it would start working.

“Now I wouldn’t know where to start fixing it.”

She upgraded to a windmill that Hugh had originally built in Zimbabwe. “It was a lot more power,” she adds. “Once you start going down that road, you don’t go back.”

Now her croft runs on a combination of wind turbine and solar panels: plenty to keep the lights on, her laptop running for work, the freezer ticking along and, usually, the washing machine when she needs it.

It’s backed up if needed with a petrol generator, and hot water for bathing and radiators is provided by the solid fuel Rayburn stove.  

Life, though, revolves around keeping watch on the voltmeter in the kitchen.

“You are constantly glancing at it. If it’s at 12.3 it’s great, you can get on and do things.

Hugh Piggott repairs one of Scoraig's early windmills (Image: Hugh Piggott)

“If it drops into the 11s, then you might put on the generator, turn the freezer from -20 to -16 and don’t open the door.

“All depends on the weather. If you are getting a surplus, you have everything on at once or you have to dump it.

“If I’m planning to do a washing, I won’t do it unless it’s windy or sunny.

“It’s better than it used to be,” she adds. “I used to have to wait for the wind to blow and end up rushing out at 2am to get the washing on.

“Sometimes even now when things dip you do run out of clean clothes and there’s a mountain of washing but no-one here is going to bother if I’m wearing the same clothes.”

The need to still rely on fossil fuels for vehicles and as a back-up for generators weighs heavily on her mind remains an issue, she adds.

While instant electricity has brought unexpected changes: it’s made the once closeknit community a bit less bonded than it once was.

“The population is much the same as when I first came but it felt much more sociable because we didn’t have televisions and we weren’t all doing our own thing.

“Now we all have Netflix. In the evenings now, it’s a cup of tea at 9pm and off to bed to watch television.

“Back in the day, there was quite of lot of gathering together.

“It’s less of a necessity now to get the old guitar out and be sociable.”