We are delighted to announce that we have been asked to write a monthly newspaper column in our local Newspaper, The Lynn News. It’s focus is the environment but instead of the usual doom and gloom about the impending climate emergency, it’s an observation and ramblings of local environmentalism, issues that concern the local people in West Norfolk and beyond.
So as well as the occasional blog about the business, new products and general updates, we’ll also be posting a ‘View from a Shed’ the name of my new column, a day or two after it appears in the Lynn News.
Here’s the first one, published 2nd April. Due to be published the first Friday of every Month.
The tides are a changing
With King’s Lynn slap bang on the front line with regards to the effects of a changing climate, it makes sense to talk about the environment.
As one of the UK’s Port Towns and having tidal waters that not only shaped our Heritage and position in the World, the tide has also shaped our immediate environment.
For hundreds of years, since the River was routed through King’s Lynn, the tides have shaped our immediate area and continue to do so as they cut a swathe through the Norfolk Fenland via the River Great Ouse. The UK’s fourth longest river and with one of the highest tidal ranges in the country, which in turn gives way to The Eagre, a tidal bore that can be seen from The Wiggenhall’s and Stowbridge.
It is said that the power of the incoming tide alone, could boil every kettle in West Norfolk if harnessed. Tidal power is probably the cleanest of all renewable energies and definitely the most predicable. The tide changes in King’s Lynn every 12hrs and 24mins. It’s a moon thing and who knows, one day, years from now, we may see small ‘boats’ anchored along the rivers course, just sitting there, bobbing up and down, all connected to under water turbines and cables to the shoreline connected to the national grid powering our homes.
And whilst public attitudes to wind turbines have changed, many homeowners have also cottoned on to the fact that when the wind is supplying more energy than what the Nation needs, some energy companies actually pay their customers to take energy from them! There is a growing number of people in the UK now being paid to charge their electric vehicles and residential battery systems when it ‘too windy. Rather than turning them off and paying out subsidies to land owners who littered the countryside during the feed in tariff free for all.
Our natural environment brings a plethora of benefits for all of us, be it an abundance of renewable energy or somewhere to go for relaxation, leisure and pleasure and what better than Norfolk’s big open skies to clear the head and appreciate what’s important in life.
Fresh air. You can’t beat it. And it’s free.
And to think was only 4 years ago, Great Britain celebrated it’s first coal free hour with regards to the National Grid energy mix. That one hour became a day, then several days, then we went a week and yes, a whole month. Last year, just over 5% of the nation’s energy came from coal. The same amount as solar and there’s only one million solar homes! We’ll be done with coal within the next few years, and with it, those old polluting attitudes to coal will die out as well.
Within a few years, the children that enter this World, will be born into a Country that doesn’t burn coal any more. It would be lovely to think that on their first journey home from the Hospital, that when they looked out of the car window and saw their new home for the first time, it wasn’t strewn with litter along the verges and pavements with piles of household clearance dumped on country lanes.
But I think that’s a subject for another time.