Windmills around Britain

Published on December 10, 2007 in Windmills and green energy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

John Hutton, Cabinet Minister and first Secretary of State for Business says he wants offshore windmills to power all British homes by the year 2020, the plan is therefore to open up the British coastline to thousands more massive wind turbines. His proposal gets my vote. They will be out of the way to fewer planning problems and the winds are better out there.

Could it be that under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who did so much for the stabilisation of the UK economy by making the Bank of England independent, the UK is now going to move into a new innovative climate change phase that will genuinely have an impact on global warming? I hope so.

Now let’s see some more UK Government action to force the automobile industry to move at a faster speed to replace conventional internal combustion engines with electric propulsion.

And let’s start a National Plan to Plant Trees. When the hills and moorlands are afforested, as they were hundreds of years ago, we in the UK can genuinely say we are making our proper contribution.

Bye for now

Rob

(Rob Hopcott – online author – fiction – news)

Going green with my wind-up, solar powered radio

Published on December 10, 2007 in green energy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

I’m off to a folk festival this weekend where I’ll be sleeping overnight in my camper van. My leisure battery has proved not to be terribly reliable so I’m going green and trying to minimise use of electricity as much as possible with a new windup green, solar powered radio.

It would be rather nice if the colour of the wind up solar powered radio was green but instead it’s a rather nice blue colour with a large handle to turn for generating electricity to power the radio.

There’s also a small solar panel on the top of the radio which can provide electricity but I’m not sure how much because it’s not a very big one.

As a last resort, and this wouldn’t be possible over the weekend when I will be camping, there is a power pack enabling the radio to be plugged into mains electric.

Disappointingly, for somebody who is determined to be green, the instructions require the radio to be fully charged from the mains electricity before first use.

Surprisingly, the instructions state that 30 seconds of winding can produce 30 minutes of working radio. The internal electricity generator must be quite efficient.

This exercise in going green is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Personally, I think it would be nice if every house had a sort of workout area where people could convert human energy into electrical energy.

Imagine a really heavy weight that turned around an electricity generator as it descended to the floor. With one bit of exertion, perhaps it would be possible to produce hours of electricity. It’s low-tech but I don’t see why it shouldn’t be very possible and the exercise may even do some of us who are a little overweight some good.

I noticed the other day that a fitness training centre was using the energy from their running machines to power some bits of electrical equipment.

The advantage of lifting a heavy weight would be that it would store up energy which could be released as needed over a period of time. There would need to be a little bit of electronics to stop the weight descending when the power wasn’t needed or, possibly, the electricity could be stored in be rechargeable battery.

For me, all this makes much more sense than having to rely on a windmill.

Now I wonder if I can get a solar powered saxophone!

Bye for now

Rob

(Rob Hopcott – online author going green)