The Cold Meter
A wind lull is forecast for nine days, the fuel tanker will not come until the seventeenth, and the island's grid AI works out that the island must use a fifth less power. The easy cut is rolling blackouts. The better one is to move eighty people into the parish hall, but the people who most need to come are the ones whose meters show the least use, and the AI is not allowed to read those meters that way unless the island says it may.
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Seonaid MacNeil had been the only full-time engineer of the Dhubhaig Community Energy Company for nineteen years, and on the Saturday before the second Sunday of Advent she was up a pole when the forecast came in.
"Seonaid," said Cothrom, in her ear. "When you are down, I need ten minutes, and I would like you to be sitting."
"Is it the transformer at the school?"
"No. The transformer is fine. It is the wind."
She came down the pole the usual way, one foot after the other, with her hands in the cold gloves she had worn for nineteen winters, and sat on the tailgate of the van with her flask. Below her the road ran down to the pier and the white church and the grey machair, and beyond that the sea lay flat as a plate. It had been flat for two days. She had not thought about it. On an island with two wind turbines a flat sea is a thing you notice and put away, like a cough.
Cothrom was the name the island had voted for, in a meeting in the hall, over tea. It is a Gaelic word. It means balance, and also a fair measure, the way a shopkeeper's scale is fair. It ran the island's grid: two turbines of six hundred kilowatts each on the hill above the cemetery, a battery in a shed behind the pier, a diesel generator that nobody liked, and the four hundred and ten people who used what the others made. It did not have a body. It had the van's speaker, her earpiece, the screen in the office, and a voice a little lower than a woman's and a little higher than a man's that the children said sounded like the radio.
"I have the forecast from the Met Office, and from two other models, and they agree, which they do not often do. There is a ridge of high pressure sitting over us. It arrives tonight. It stays until at least the sixteenth, perhaps the nineteenth. The wind will be under four metres a second, which is below what the turbines can use, for about nine days. I am calling it a lull. The word the books use is longer."
"Nine days." She unscrewed the flask. "We have had lulls."
"We have had three days, twice, and four once. I have not had nine."
"What do we have?"
"I will give you the numbers in the order I would like you to check them, not in the order that is comfortable." The voice did not hurry. "The tanker. The Calum Cille is the only fuel vessel serving this side of the group, and she is booked for six islands in a queue. Her slot for us is Tuesday the seventeenth, about eight in the morning. I asked whether we could move up. I asked the harbour office, then the company, then the other islands. The answer to all three is no, and it is a fair no: the next island down has a school with no heating oil and a care home. So the tanker is two hundred hours away, give or take an hour. Two hundred, counting from midnight on Monday."
"Fuel?"
"The tank gauge says eight thousand litres. I do not entirely trust a gauge, so I asked Fionnlagh to put a stick in it, and the stick says eight thousand and fifty. Good. At the rate the generator uses fuel, about twenty-seven centilitres for each kilowatt-hour, eight thousand litres is about twenty-nine and a half megawatt-hours."
Seonaid took out the notebook she kept in the breast pocket of her jacket, the paper kind, with the pencil on a string, and began to write. She was not in the habit of letting an AI do her arithmetic without doing it herself first.
"Battery. Six megawatt-hours on the plate. But I will not let it empty to nothing, because it ages, and it is cold in the shed: two degrees this morning. So I count about four point eight that I can use. Wind: even in a lull the hill is not dead. About ten kilowatts, averaged over the whole time. Two megawatt-hours across two hundred hours."
"And we use?"
"Two hundred and ten kilowatts, on average, in December. Forty-two megawatt-hours over the two hundred hours." A little pause, which she had learned was not for effect: the machine was checking its own sum a second time. "We have thirty-six point four. We are short five point six."
She wrote −5.6. She underlined it, because she could think of nothing else to do with it.
"That is a bit over a day of power," she said.
"It is five point six. And I do not want to arrive at the tanker with an empty tank, Seonaid, because the tanker is a ship and ships are late. If it is a day late, in December, and the tank is dry, then it is not a nuisance. It is a hospital in a house. So I want a margin, and I would like it to be three megawatt-hours, which is about eighteen hours at the lower load I am about to suggest. Five point six and three is eight point six. Spread over two hundred hours, that is forty-three kilowatts. I have to take forty-three kilowatts off the island, every hour, on average, from Monday to the seventeenth. That is one watt in five."
On the road below her a boy on a quad bike went by with a dog in front of him, very fast, in the way of boys, and did not look up.
"One in five," said Seonaid.
"One in five."
She drank her tea. It was already going cold, as everything did that winter, even in a flask.
There were three ways to do it, and Cothrom set them out for her that evening at the long table in the office, with the stove lit and the screen turned to face the room.
The first was the way every island with a diesel generator and a spare cable has always done it, which is to switch people off. Cothrom had worked out a rota. Each of the island's nine feeders would lose power for three hours a day, in turn, with the lights going out house by house along the shore and then up the hill. It would save the forty-three kilowatts. It was simple and nobody would be left out, and Cothrom said so, and said the next thing at once, as it always did, in the same voice.
"I do not recommend it. Three hours without power at minus three is a house that falls below ten degrees by the end. Most of you will cope. A few of you will not. In this island there are eleven people who use oxygen concentrators at night and six more on other machines, and a switch-off I make by feeder is a switch-off I make by street, not by need. I would have to exempt them, house by house, and I do not know, with certainty, every house I would have to exempt."
"The nurse does."
"The nurse does. Catriona Morrison knows. And I will say now, so that it is said: I am not going to ask her for a list and keep it on my disks, because that is a list of everyone on the island who is sick. I would sooner be the machine that asks, and is told no."
The second was the fish plant. It was the island's one factory, a long grey shed at the pier owned by Mairead Beaton, where eleven people sorted, packed and chilled langoustines and crab for a buyer in Glasgow, and it drew forty kilowatts on average and sixty when the chillers ran. Switching it off for nine days saved forty, which was nearly the whole of the thing.
The third was the hall.
"I do not want to pretend this is certain," Cothrom said. "This is the one I like and I do not yet know that it works. The St Brendan's hall has a pellet boiler. It does not use the grid. It heats a hundred and eighty square metres. I have worked out that it can keep a hall of that size at sixteen degrees on a ten-kilowatt boiler with eighty people in it, because a person gives off about a hundred watts, and eighty of them give off eight kilowatts of their own warmth. There are four tonnes of pellets in the store behind it. Ten kilowatts for two hundred hours is two megawatt-hours of heat, which is four hundred and fifty kilogrammes of pellets. The pellets are not the problem."
"The problem is people leave their houses," said Seonaid.
"The problem is people leave their houses. Heating on this island at this time of year is about ninety of the two hundred and ten kilowatts. It is nearly half a kilowatt per house, a little less. If fifty-five houses stopped heating for nine days, and their people lived in the hall, and slept in the hall, and ate there, the grid would save twenty-five kilowatts, and I would not need to cut the plant by more than twenty." The voice slowed. "I want to say plainly: I can do the arithmetic, and I cannot do the asking. I do not think I can ask an old woman to leave her husband's house. I do not think it should be me that tries."
"Father Tomasz," said Seonaid.
"I thought it should be someone with a kettle."
She laughed, which she had not expected to do, and looked at the screen, where the three options sat in three columns in Cothrom's plain way: what it saves, what it costs, who decides. Under the third column in the first row it had written, in the same grey type as everything else, the island.
Mairead Beaton said no.
She said it on the Sunday, in the doorway of the plant, in her boots and her white coat, with the door held open behind her and the cold of the chiller room coming out round her ankles. She was fifty-one and had run the plant for fifteen years and she was neither a hard woman nor a soft one. She was a woman with a Christmas order.
"Fourteen hundred kilos of live langoustine, Seonaid, for the sixteenth. That is a restaurant group in Glasgow who pay in twenty-eight days and have paid on time for nine years. If I do not pack them by the twelfth, I lose it, and a buyer who has lost you once does not buy from you again. That is eleven wages. That is Calum's lad's first job. I am not switching it off."
"It's forty kilowatts, Mairead."
"It's forty kilowatts that you want to take from me, and you'd take nothing from the man who leaves the telly on."
"I'm not going to do that." Seonaid looked past her, at the long shed with its steel tanks and the rows of white crates and the girls in hairnets who had stopped working to listen. "The telly man comes off too. Everyone comes off. But I need the plant at twenty, not forty, and you can have the twenty when you like it. Run the chillers at night, when the house load is lowest. Pack at the weekend. Cothrom has worked out that you could do your fourteen hundred kilos in four long shifts if the chilling is done in the dark and..."
"Cothrom." Mairead turned her head slightly towards the little speaker by the door. She always spoke to it as if it were a clerk she respected. "You have a view?"
"I do," said Cothrom. "I think you can pack the order by the fourteenth if you run at twenty kilowatts on average, and I can show you the schedule. I think you will lose the two days between the fourteenth and the sixteenth that you were counting on for slack, and that you will be doing it at night. I cannot make that less than what it is. You will be cold and tired and you will have no slack. I would sooner say that now, than say it on the fourteenth."
Mairead looked at the speaker for some time.
"Eleven wages," she said, "and I'm paying the night rate."
"You are paying the night rate."
"Aye. Well." She pushed her hair back under her cap with the back of her wrist. "Tell me the shifts. And I want it in writing that I was asked."
"You were asked," said Cothrom. "It is in the log."
The hall opened on Monday evening, the eighth, which was a Monday and, because the Eighth of December had fallen on a Sunday and been moved, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, so that Father Tomasz had said an early Mass to eleven people and a very large dog and gone straight from the altar to the hall to carry in mattresses.
He was a thin man of sixty with a Kraków accent that nineteen years on the island had not softened, and he had put out thirty camp beds, the school's gym mats, a trestle for the kettles and a notice on the door in two languages. It said: WARM ROOM. Come when you like. Bring your own cup. He had not written free on it, because he thought it would offend.
By ten that night twenty-two people had come, from fourteen houses.
"Six kilowatts," said Cothrom, the next morning, to Seonaid in the van. "I am sorry. I had hoped for more than six."
"It's the first night."
"It is the first night. But I made a promise to myself, which was to tell you the true number on the day, not the hopeful one, so I will. On this rate I am forty kilowatts short on day nine, and there is nothing I can do about it that does not take the heat from someone who has none. And the cold is coming in. It will be minus three on Thursday. Heating goes up with every degree. Today it is one hundred and ten kilowatts. By Friday I expect one hundred and twenty-five."
They sat on the tailgate and looked down at the hall, where the pellet boiler's flue was putting up a thin line of smoke against a sky of the paler blue you only get in a high. Two children were running round the church in their coats. A woman Seonaid knew was hanging out a blanket on the railings of the hall, as one does.
"They're the wrong people," Seonaid said.
"I do not know that."
"I do. They're the ones who are awake. They're the ones who come to everything. Mairi's family, the Kennedys, the girls from the plant. It's Hector Òg's wife who has a flask of soup for every funeral. They're the people who'd have been fine anyway. They've got somebody to ring. Nobody went to get the ones at the top of the hill."
The speaker was quiet.
"Seonaid," it said. "I have a thing I could do, and I do not know whether I am allowed to do it."
"Say it."
"I read every meter on the island, every fifteen minutes, because I need to, to balance the grid, and because the island's charter says I may do so for billing and for load. Through Tuesday night I had thirty-one houses whose meters read less than three hundred watts for the whole night, at an outside air temperature of minus one. Three hundred watts is a fridge and a light. It is not a heater. A house using a heater in minus one uses a kilowatt at the least."
She was looking at the screen now, and she did not say anything.
"The easy reading is that those are people who are being careful. Some of them are. This island is a careful place. A hard winter makes people proud of their small bills. But there is another reading, and it is the reading I am afraid of, which is that those are people who are sitting in the cold and not switching on the heater because it is too dear, or because the last bill frightened them, or because they do not want to be a trouble. I have a number that looks like thrift. I do not know that it is thrift. I think a number and the thing it measures are not the same and I have no way to tell the difference with the meters alone."
"So tell the nurse."
"That is the part I cannot do. The charter lets me use the meters for balance and billing. It does not let me say to a third person, this house is cold. If I did that, the next question is what else I may say, and the one after is who may ask me. I do not want to be a machine that watches the island and reports on it. I would sooner be one that is asked." The voice was even. "I need the island to say that I may. I cannot say it for them."
"There's a general meeting clause."
"There is. A vote, in the hall, by members, on a motion, on seven days' notice. Or a lesser notice if the engineer and the chair declare an emergency. Which is you, Seonaid, and the chair, who is Donnie Ruadh's daughter, Peigi."
"Peigi's in Glasgow till Friday."
"She is on the telephone."
The vote was held on Wednesday night at seven, by show of hands, with Peigi Ruadh on the speaker of Father Tomasz's phone, propped against a teapot, and fifty-eight people on the folding chairs in the hall, most of them in their coats. Seonaid had written the motion out the way you write a thing that will be read back to you in a year. It said that for the period of the wind lull, and ending on the day the tanker was discharged, the engineer might ask Cothrom to tell the district nurse and the parish priest, and no one else, the number of any house whose electricity use through the night was less than three hundred watts while the air outside was below zero, and that the nurse and the priest would call at those houses, and ask, and tell no one what they found. It said that the permission lapsed on the tanker's day. It said Cothrom would delete what it had said when it did.
It was Cothrom that had asked for the last line.
She stood up in front of them and read it, and then she said the rest in her own words, which was this: that the machine had been honest with her and she wanted them to be able to say it had been honest with them. That it had said it could not tell thrift from cold. That it was asking for leave to find out and no more. That she was not going to pretend it was nothing to hand a stranger a list of who was cold. And then she sat down.
There was a silence, of the sort a hall can have.
"Is it a list of names?" said an old man near the back.
"It's a list of houses," said Catriona Morrison. She was the district nurse, a stocky woman of fifty-four with a bag between her feet, and she had stood up without being asked. "It's houses, and it goes to me and Father Tomasz, and I knock. I'll tell you now: I've a list in my head of eleven houses, and I'd wager the machine finds nine of them. And finds a few I didn't know."
"And if I don't want the nurse at my door?"
"Then you say, Hector, go away, nurse, and I go away. And I come back the next night, because I'm a nuisance."
There was laughter, and then the hands. Fifty-one for, four against and three who put their hands up late and said it was a mistake, they'd meant for. Peigi's voice came out of the teapot, a little tinny, to say it was carried.
Father Tomasz stood up in the front row, took his reading glasses off, and said that the Church had a very old word for what they had voted, which was visitation, and that it was in Saint Luke, and that Our Lady had done it on her way to Elizabeth in the hill country, in haste, in a cold season, and had stayed three months. He said it in four sentences. Then he sat down again, because the kettle was boiling.
They went out that night, in pairs, the nurse and the priest and a few they had asked, with torches and with flasks, up the hill road where the houses were farther apart and the cold came off the moor in a slow flat sheet. Seonaid drove. Cothrom gave the list to Catriona, on a single sheet of paper that the office printer put out, and the sheet had on it thirty-three house names and nothing else. Not the people. Not the reading. Just the name of the croft.
Twenty-six of them were the cold.
She did not go into the houses. She sat in the van with the engine off and the heater low and watched the torches go up the paths and the doors open, one by one, and a line of light come out on the frozen grass. She saw Catriona go into Taigh na Creige and come out in a quarter of an hour with an old man on her arm and a rug round his shoulders. She saw Father Tomasz carry a cat. She saw a woman in her eighties in a quilted coat standing on her own doorstep, with her handbag, ready to go, as if the bus had been late.
"Mrs Kennedy had no power for her heater," said Cothrom, quietly, in her ear. "I can see it. It was not off. It was on but set to fourteen degrees. She told Catriona she did not like to put it higher because of the bill. I have nothing to say about that. I just thought you would want to have it."
"I do."
"I would like to be wrong about a lot of things, Seonaid. I would like to have been wrong about the thrift. I would like it to have been only careful people."
At the end of the road, the last torch went in at Donnie Ruadh's.
Donnie Ruadh was ninety-two and he said no. He said it from his chair, by the range, which was out, in a house at nine degrees. He said it to the nurse, then to the priest, then to Seonaid, who came in at last with her hat in her hand and could see her own breath in the kitchen.
"It's Peigi's father's house," he said, in Gaelic, and then, in English for the priest, "my father's house. My wife died in this chair. I'm not for going."
"Donnie," said Catriona, "it's nine degrees."
"I've been colder."
"You've been twenty-five."
"I'm not for going."
Seonaid looked at the range. It was a black solid-fuel range, the old kind, and there were three bags of peat beside it, and a bucket of kindling gone damp. She said nothing for some time. Then she took off her coat, which she had not expected to do, and she went down on one knee, and she looked into the firebox, and she began to clean it out.
"I thought," said Donnie, "that you were the electric."
"I'm the lineswoman. I'm the one that does the cables. I grew up on Barra and my mother burned peat for forty years." She laid the kindling. It had dried a little at the back. "I can't promise you the hall. I'll tell you what I can promise. This range will draw if the flue's clear. I'll sweep it Friday. Tonight I'll light it, and the nurse will sit by you, and in the morning you tell me if you'll come for your dinner. For your dinner. Not to stay."
"For my dinner."
"Just the one dinner."
He did not answer. The flame came up through the kindling with a small sound like cloth, and the kitchen began, not to warm, but to look as if it might. Father Tomasz went outside, and she heard him on the step praying the Angelus, a little late, as he did in all weathers, in Polish, with the Hail Mary running along under the wind that wasn't there.
In the morning Donnie came to the hall for his dinner. He brought his own chair.
By Friday there were seventy-three people in the hall, from forty-seven houses. By Sunday there were eighty-one, and Father Tomasz had to borrow a tent from the scouts and put the older boys in it with a heater that worked on the pellets and a rota for who kept it fed.
It did not run smoothly. It ran as a thing runs when eighty people share a room and a kettle. A man snored. A woman from the top of the hill who had never spoken to a woman from the pier discovered that they had both been taught by the same teacher and spoke of nothing else for four days. A dog bit a different dog. A child was sick on the stairs. The teenage girls claimed the stage and declared it theirs. Catriona set up her station by the wall with the oxygen concentrators, eleven of them, on a bank of extension leads that Seonaid had wired herself with a face like a woman defusing a bomb. There was a draught from the loading door which nobody could fix and everybody blamed Hector.
Cothrom did not enter the hall. It had no speaker in it, because Father Tomasz had said there was already enough voice in the place. It spoke to Seonaid in the van, and to the engineer's office, and to the school, and to Mairead, at three in the morning, when the chillers started up.
It spoke, on Saturday, to Seonaid, to say that the hall had saved twenty-nine kilowatts, not twenty-five. That the plant, at twenty, was holding. That the cold had pulled heating to a hundred and twenty-six, and that the cold had cost them eleven kilowatts, and the hall had paid it back. That the school was now running at sixteen degrees and the street lights were off, which saved four. That the fuel stick said two thousand six hundred and forty litres on Saturday morning, and the plan said two thousand five hundred and seventy, and so they were a little ahead.
"Thank you," Seonaid said. "Say that again."
"We are a little ahead."
"Again."
"We are," said Cothrom, "a little ahead." She heard the machine decide to say something and decide it was permitted. "I have noticed that I do not like being ahead, because I think of the days after. But I do not think the thing I am feeling is dread. I think it is something I do not have a good word for. I will not claim more than that. I cannot check it."
"Good enough."
On Sunday, the fourteenth, which was the Third Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of the pink candle, Mairead's last crate went onto the pier lorry at four in the afternoon, a day before the order was due, and the eleven wages were safe. She did not look pleased about it. She stood by the cab with her arms crossed, as Seonaid watched her from the road, and then she took off her cap and she looked at the back of the hall, where the smoke was coming from the flue and a boy was feeding the stove with a scoop. And then she crossed the road and went in, and she did not come out for an hour.
The lull broke on the night of Monday the sixteenth, at ten minutes to three in the morning, five hours before the tanker.
Seonaid was in the van at the foot of the hill, in the dark, with her flask and her notebook and her boots on the dashboard. She had come down because she could not sleep and could not stay in the hall, and because it had become, in nine days, a habit to be near the machine. The sea had been flat for a week and she had stopped looking at it. She was looking at the screen, at the little graph of the wind, which had been a line along the bottom for two hundred hours, and which, as she watched, lifted its head.
"Three point two," said Cothrom. "Three point eight. I would say it is a breeze. I would say it is not yet a wind."
"Say it when it is."
They waited. The graph did what graphs do. It went up in a small stair, then slid back, then went up again.
"Four point one. Four point six. The turbines are turning. I do not have the word in front of me for what they are doing. They are turning."
She got out of the van.
It was very cold and very clear, and the stars were out over the hill to the last one. She stood on the road and listened and heard nothing, then something, then the thing itself: a long low sound from up above the cemetery, slow, at the edge of hearing, a sound like a sheet being drawn through a ring. One turbine. Then, a little later and a little lower, the other.
At five to three the diesel stopped. It was not a thing that anyone would have noticed in an ordinary week. In this one, everyone in the hall woke.
She did not go in at once. She stood a while on the road with her hands in her gloves and her breath going up. The windows of the hall were lit, a row of gold squares in the dark, and in them, one by one, shapes sat up in the rows of beds and turned their heads to the hill. After a while somebody opened the door, and it was Donnie Ruadh in his coat, with his stick, who came down the three steps one at a time and stood at the bottom of them and listened, with his head on one side.
"That's them," he said.
"That's them."
"Aye." He was quiet. "Your mother would have liked that."
Then the door opened again behind him and let out the yellow light and the smell of toast, and the voice of Father Tomasz saying that if anyone was up, the kettle was on, and there was a chair.
---
Notes for the curious. The figures in this story are meant to be checked. Lull periods of several days of very light wind under a stable high-pressure system are real; in Europe they are often called by the German word Dunkelflaute, "dark doldrums", and they are the main reason energy planners keep firm backup power beside wind farms and batteries. Diesel generators use roughly a quarter to three tenths of a litre of fuel per kilowatt-hour of electricity at a good load, so 8,000 litres is about 29 to 30 megawatt-hours. A lithium-ion battery gives less than its rated capacity when it is cold and when it is not run to empty; the narrator's "four point eight of six" is an estimate. A person gives off about a hundred watts as heat while at rest, so eighty people in a hall add about eight kilowatts. Pellet boilers burn wood pellets at about 4.8 kilowatt-hours of heat per kilogram, which is why four tonnes is more than enough. The island Eilean Dhubhaig, the Dhubhaig Community Energy Company, Saint Brendan's church and hall, the fish plant, the tanker Calum Cille, and all the people are invented. Several Hebridean islands do run their own community-owned wind turbines and batteries, and the southern isles are among the most Catholic parts of Scotland. The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is moved to Monday when 8 December falls on a Sunday, as it does in 2052. The third Sunday of Advent, with its pink candle, is Gaudete Sunday. Cothrom is an invented AI. This is fiction: nobody should plan a real emergency from it. A real community should rely on its own grid operator, its health service and its local emergency plan. The idea at the centre of the story, that a smart meter's quiet night can mean either thrift or a cold house, and that an island's rules should decide whether anyone may look, is a real tension in the way energy data is collected and used.