# Behind the fiction

> What in these pieces is invented, and the real things, as of mid-2026, that the fiction rests on.

Part of [Oil Rigs to Training Rigs](https://blind-ant.com/pieces/oil-rigs-to-training-rigs/index.md), a Piece.

Notes, 2026.

What in these pieces is invented, and the real things, as of mid-2026, that the fiction rests on.

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.

[Back to Oil Rigs to Training Rigs](https://blind-ant.com/pieces/oil-rigs-to-training-rigs/).