Keeping the lights on somewhere near you - From the Editor

Out cycling at the weekend, I noticed a cluster of four wind turbines I hadn’t seen before – seems they were installed in 2014. Last week, a new low-head hydroelectricity project was opened on a stretch of river an hour from where I live. One of the churches in my town is currently in a battle with the planning committee over its proposal to have an array of photovoltaic panels – in the shape of a cross – installed on its roof. The initial answer to the planning application was no, but I suspect the church will get its way eventually, even with the current uncertainty over feed-in tariff payments. All three schemes are designed to feed power from renewable sources into the local electricity grid.

This is my local view of the distributed power ‘revolution’ that I discussed in the last issue – the move from a centralised electricity system based on a small number of remote fossil and nuclear power stations, to one in which many thousands of small-scale, local ‘power stations’ mostly based on renewables play a major part.