I have a tendency to take on things that are way too difficult for me. In fact, when at school, classmates started building model aircraft to fly, I, instead of going for the smallest and easiest one, went for an enormous plane that was totally beyond my wood and tissue paper building skills.
It seems like history is repeating itself, as I continue to worry about how I can help save the planet. Some months ago, I wrote about the Stealthgen, a wind-powered generator that you could attach to your house, to save using fossil fuels to power your home. Then some bloke called David Cameron got one and the I just seemed to go off the idea, I cannot think why. I may be a closet green, but I am definitely not blue.
So, I was re-thinking the idea and it struck me that thinking big might be the answer. Instead of a small wind turbine on my house, how about one the size of several houses stacked atop each other, but parked on some convenient lofty and windy location. I am not being greedy. This wouldn't be used to feed some power-crazed habit, but to supply the whole local community - a few roads around where I live. I have even found some people in Wales who have done just that, near the Centre for Alternative Technology, and have posted information on how they did it. That's the power of internet communication for you - there is always a shared experience from which to learn.
Having watched one of the BBC's climate chaos programmes, starring David Attenborough however, I am thinking that even that isn't going to be good enough to avoid the impending catastrophe. What we need is a whole wind farm to supply a large proportion of Newbury's electrical power needs. The downside is that with each scaling up of this project, the degree of difficulty and the number of people who must be convinced that this is a good idea goes up and up. To me it is self evident but I too have a habit of jumping from problem to solution missing out all that argument stuff that goes on in between.
More anon.
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