How it could generate electricity
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 4:30 am
My personal interest in green energy started in the hot summer of 1976 when I was 12. My Dad was a mechanical engineering lecturer at Warwick University and he had a sabbatical that year working at The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth. We lived there as a family for the six weeks of the school holidays. It was cyprus mobile number a bit of a hippy commune in those days, but my sister and I were used to our parents’ alternative lifestyle with anti-nuclear stickers on the car, muesli and homemade wholemeal bread as part of a mostly vegetarian diet at home. How normal those ideas feel today!
At CAT, I learned about windmills and water turbines, organic gardening, biogas generators and solar panels of all shapes and sizes. I remember seeing a solar PV panel the size of a credit card and puzzling over from sunlight with no moving parts. I returned to CAT many times over the years and volunteered there in the summer holidays each year during university. I worked on all sorts of projects, but the most memorable was at Dulas Engineering—a CAT spin off technical consultancy—where we made 50 battery control systems for a UN project providing portable wind power for Mongolian nomads!
My Dad went on to write the ‘Engineering Design for Alternative Technology’ course for Warwick University and co-edit ‘An Alternative Energy Strategy for the United Kingdom’ published in 1978. That strategy was updated 30 years later as ‘Zero Carbon Britain’, which you can read about here.
At CAT, I learned about windmills and water turbines, organic gardening, biogas generators and solar panels of all shapes and sizes. I remember seeing a solar PV panel the size of a credit card and puzzling over from sunlight with no moving parts. I returned to CAT many times over the years and volunteered there in the summer holidays each year during university. I worked on all sorts of projects, but the most memorable was at Dulas Engineering—a CAT spin off technical consultancy—where we made 50 battery control systems for a UN project providing portable wind power for Mongolian nomads!
My Dad went on to write the ‘Engineering Design for Alternative Technology’ course for Warwick University and co-edit ‘An Alternative Energy Strategy for the United Kingdom’ published in 1978. That strategy was updated 30 years later as ‘Zero Carbon Britain’, which you can read about here.