Neighbours used to call Alan Pinder a crank

Energy in the home

Inside Out West explores how our region is leading the way in one of the most important debates facing mankind - how we should generate and use energy in our homes.

As climate change becomes a bigger issue in many peoples' lives, it's clear that some of the solutions to the threat of global warming are being formulated right here.

Good Energy

Juliet Davenport from Malmesbury has started an energy company, called Good Energy.

It gets all the electricity it sells from wind machines, solar panels and tidal turbines.

Juliet Davenport. Energy from wind sun and sea

Juliet has been fascinated by climate change ever since she read an article in a magazine when she was a physics student back in the 1980s:

"The article made it clear that climate change was real and I knew I wanted to help to do something about it.

"Good Energy gets all of its power from renewable sources - wind farms, dotted along the coast, which is where you find most of the energy source, solar panels and hydro stations, down on the north Devon coast and up into Scotland.

"If people have solar panels at their home, or a small wind turbine, they can produce their own energy - which is both green and clean - and any surplus they generate they can, via us, put back into the national grid, so others can buy that green energy that they have generated at home.

"It's called micro-generation and the more people get involved themselves, the more green energy we can produce across the West and the whole of the UK."

Solar panels supply emission free power

Micro-generation

Alan Pinder, a retired author from Thornbury, is one of the first to get involved with micro-generation.

Alan says: "I have been campaigning for the environment for 30 years now and I have tried to be as self sufficient as possible, by growing my own fruit and veg, so it was a natural extension to want to produce our own electricity.

"We have solar panels on the back of the house and a water heater on the front.

"It is wonderful. I can sleep at night knowing I am not adding to global warming."

Alan says 10 years ago people used to call him a crank for being green but now he says people in Thornbury come to him for advice on how to be more environmentally friendly.

Christopher Booker is a critic of green energy.

But not everyone in the West agrees wind and solar power is the way forward. Christopher Booker, who co-founded Private Eye and now writes for the Sunday Telegraph dismisses any plans to rely on the wind and the sun for our energy supplies.

Christopher says, "The wind is lovely - I love to see it blowing through trees - but if we want to live in a society where we have Tesco, the BBC and our homes running all the time, then wind power is a total waste of time.

"It doesn't blow all the time, so how can you rely on it to keep everything running. The only serious option we have is to build a new round of nuclear power stations.

"They don't produce any CO2 and they are there all the time. What more do you want."

Links relating to this story:

• BBC Weather - Climate change
• BBC Science and Nature - Climate change
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• UK Met Office
• Climatic Research Unit

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