Skerry Alpha, Haar Compute and all the people in these pieces are invented. Most of what they do rests on things that are real, as of mid-2026:

• Scotland regularly produces more wind power than the grid can carry south, and wind farms are paid to switch off when that happens.

• Microsoft's Project Natick ran a sealed seabed data centre off Orkney from 2018 to 2020 and reported a hardware failure rate around one eighth of an equivalent on land. Commercial underwater data centres have since been built in China.

• Scotland has operated pumped hydro storage since the 1960s, and large new schemes have been in planning.

• Orkney has produced hydrogen from surplus wind. Hydrogen stored and turned back into electricity returns only around a third of the energy, so it suits long calm spells, not everyday smoothing.

• North Sea decommissioning is expected to cost tens of billions over the coming decades, with a large share falling on taxpayers through tax relief.

• Several companies are developing data centres in orbit, and getting rid of heat in a vacuum remains one of their hardest problems.

• Freeman Dyson proposed in 1960 that an advanced civilisation might surround its star with energy-collecting structures, the idea now known as a Dyson sphere or swarm.

• Some data centre operators have begun agreeing to scale back AI workloads when grids are under strain, an early form of training as a flexible load.

• The largest openly released models are already "mixtures of experts," with around a trillion parameters of which only a small fraction is active at once.

• Old offshore structures act as artificial reefs, and "rigs to reefs" is a long-running and contested debate in decommissioning.

• Sonification, turning data into sound for monitoring, is an established research field. Blind people's expertise in it is badly underused.

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