I left the Island behind for a few days recently to visit friends and explore Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire – but I found a few reminders of home.
Islanders may make wind turbine blades, but we don’t get many chances to see them in action.
So it was very encouraging to see the name of Vestas on a working turbine.
I stopped counting after about three wind farms and four individual turbines.
Well done at least some of the locals for the imagination to realize that wind turbines make their Big Blue Sky more beautiful as well as helping to protect it from climate change.
Those locals included the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, with a wind turbine at the Cley Marshes Nature Reserve, ‘internationally reputed as a premier birdwatching site’.
(Though it seems the nimbys live in Norfolk as well as the Isle of Wight)
And it’s not just the wind.
In Ely I came across a public loo with solar-heated water for the basins.
But whether you think wind turbines ugly or beautiful, we need to recover from our dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.
If we don’t want wind turbines, we still need renewable energy, and we need enough of it – the sums have to work.
And on the same trip, in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge, I found the book that can help do just that.
It’s the best book I’ve ever seen on renewable energy.
David JC MacKay’s ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’ gives the actual figures we need to understand how to survive without fossil fuel. And amazingly he’s made the whole thing available free online.
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