I have advocated the creation of small local electricity networks for some time now. I was pleased to see that one of the projects considered in the Earth Shot Prize had developed exactly that. An Indian engineer has developed a local network with spill over being shared more widely as production fluctuates. It would appear the natural forces of the storms which have roared across the North of England and Scotland in this last week or so, demonstrate this need even more sharply as thousands of homes in Scotland have lost power due to power lines brought down by the high winds, with their normal service interrupted. Sometimes for days on end. I do not wish to criticise the services which have done their best to restore normal power to the homes affected, but to suggest that perhaps this National Grid strategy is not working to the best advantage of its users.
In 1976 I was living in Warminster, working for a man with a few acres he had put down to food production. He prophesied that the disturbances in the weather, barely visible then, would become more severe, with wind speeds exceeding even 120 miles an hour. The winds over these last couple of storms reached 92 miles, almost 150 km, per hour. Considerably lower than his prediction but moving towards that figure. His predicted speeds reach almost 200 km per hour. He also said that while everyone was obsessing about global warming we were in fact approaching another ice age.
I sometimes think an ice age is the only way we will manage to save marine wildlife from the desperate ravaging of the oceans we currently witness.
