Birds eye view

While some companies have started to exploit the obvious benefits of testing or showcasing potentially large scale technological and business solutions, others see the Faroe Islands as the ideal centre for developing cleantech and maritime technology.

A decade or two ago, an increasing number of people began to see clear benefits of scale. Usually, benefits of scale and strength in numbers refer to doing things big in order to reduce costs or improve efficiency. But the thinking also emerged that there were some areas, where low population numbers and geographical isolation could in fact be a clear advantage.

The small and compact population of the Faroe Islands means that it would be easy, compared to most countries, to collect demographic data or conduct DNA screenings. This possibility has not so far been exploited and applied in specific projects. However, the potential is certainly well recognised and some tentative steps were taken to establish a genetic research facility in the late 1990s.

The Faroe Islands are isolated – you have to travel hundreds of miles over the ocean to get to your nearest neighbours. This means that the Faroese people need to be self-sufficient in many ways, which in turn imposes very high demands on infrastructure and the level of service available to the population.

The geographical, demographical and political landscape mean that Faroese society is a 49,000 person strong scale model of a European/Scandinavian society of 5 or even 200 million people. The Faroes have villages and towns of varying sizes, schools, hospitals, shops, restaurants, museums, cinemas, TV/radio, telecommunication, factories, construction companies, IT-developers, all the usual trappings of a modern Western country, only a lot smaller.

There have been some examples of exploiting the small scale and insular nature of the Faroe Islands to develop business solutions for much bigger markets. Føroya Tele (Faroese Telecom) have worked closely with providers of mobile phone technology to optimise coverage and service in challenging terrain, while one of their subsidiaries, Televarpið, did some pioneering work on providing terrestrial digital television.
More recently, there has been much optimism surrounding the GRANI project. This is a research and showcase collaboration between the Faroese energy company SEV and the Danish energy company DONG. It is clear that this is a partnership with much potential, since the energy sector is often thought to be the ideal candidate for this type of showcasing and testing. Task forces have already been established and started working, and a main area of focus will be to identify and test ways to reduce fossil-fuel dependence. This will include electrical heating, heat pumps, and perhaps most interestingly the use of electric cars. GRANI will also involve optimising output from renewable energy sources through new software concepts as well as significant expansion of the number of windmills.

Although the Faroese business sector is becoming more and more diversified, there is no getting around the fact that the Faroese are a seafaring people: The areas of expertise par excellence are still the ocean and associated fields of knowledge – fisheries, navigation, aquaculture, oceanography, marine biology as well as marine-related engineering and physics. The people working within these fields are typically very highly regarded by their peers around the world, and their work is often pioneering.

The Faroese company, the Bitland Enterprise, tuned in to this fact. They had previously focused their efforts more on using the Faroes as a testing and showcasing area. However, they soon realised that most of the Faroese entrepreneurs that they were working with, as well as many of their own projects, were involved with marine technology and climate. They considered the Faroe Islands’ strategic location in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where the warm water of the Gulf Stream meet the cold waters of the Arctic, and the marine expertise that already existed, as obvious assets with a great deal of untapped development potential.

They took the logical step forward and established BlueGreenFuture. BlueGreenFuture is an initiative, funded and endorsed by industry, academia and the government. The aim is to contribute to innovation and facilitate knowledge transfer between the industry and research communities in the Transatlantic region. In some respects, BlueGreenFuture was also borne from the Trans Atlantic Climate Conference in 2008, since many of the same partners were involved in the conference, at which Nobel Prize winner Al Gore was a keynote speaker.
In addition to participating in a variety of innovative cleantech projects, including EU FP6 and EU FP7 projects, BlueGreenFuture’s operator, the Bitland Enterprise also houses many of the companies involved in the initiative.
These include:
- Decision3, which specializes in decision support systems based on state-of-the-art machine learning and data mining technology that minimizes fuel consumption on large ships.

- Ocean Rainforest which is developing methods for farming seaweed on the open sea for ocean biomass and biofuel.

- TracePlace is conducting pilot demonstration on a national traceability system for seafood and related eco-labelling potentials.

- Data Quality Systems supports the data quality management of meteorological and met-ocean observations. The company’s objective is to make Met-Ocean data more useful by ensuring efficient working processes and knowledge sharing. To demonstrate this effect the company is currently showcasing the technology in the Faroes.

The Bitland and BlueGreenFuture environment is highly interconnected, with a dynamic mix of entrepreneurs, scientists and administrators – all sharing the belief that by pooling their efforts and cooperating and collaborating across disciplines, they can stand stronger in the fiercely competitive cleantech industry.