Power to the people

Ecotricity, the company from which I buy my electricity, have just put up two wind turbines at Ballymena in Northern Ireland which will be used to provide power to the Michelin tyre factory there.
This is what people did 100 years ago. The Lots Road and Greenwich power stations in London were built in the early 1900s to provide power for trams and underground trains.
There was no National Grid. If you wanted electricity for your business, you had to build a power station.
Over time, we built bigger power stations to provide power to whoever needed it and now, it is apparently the Government’s responsibility to ensure that we have enough generating capacity to keep all our fridges and iPads running.
Ecotricity are not just making money from supplying electricity, they are looking to find better ways of providing it. The wind turbines at Ballymena follow a couple Ecotricity put up in Dundee for the Michelin factory there. They say that delivering electricity to a specific business is more efficient than adding that capacity to the grid.
Good for them. We need new thinking in this business. Instead of calculating how much electricity we are using, how much we might use in the future and building gas or nuclear stations to deliver that, why don’t we work out how to use less electricity and how to generate some of it ourselves?
The ARM company which makes chips for mobile phones and tablets, got rich by producing chips which needed less power than those produced by Intel. A government would get lots of green points if it told manufacturers their fridges and TV sets had to use 30% less power by 2015 or else.
And it is possible to build houses which use next to no electricity for heating or cooling. Why not make this part of the building regs?
It is also possible to generate electricity from the daylight which falls on glass. Tiny amounts so far, but I’m confident that clever youngsters can work out how to generate enough power in our own homes to run the energy-efficient devices we will all have if the government takes my advice.
We don’t need more power. We need to work out how to use less.