Talybont-on-Usk Energy is a community company with its own 36kW hydro electric turbine. We invest our income from the turbine in energy saving and sustainable living projects in our community in the Brecon Beacons.
Our blog keeps you up to date with what we are currently doing, thinking and talking about. Please feel free to add a comment and join in.
You can learn more about us here: www.talybontenergy.co.uk
Talybont Energy is very grateful to the Henderson Hall committee for allowing us to install an external, lockable charging point for Bluebell (our electric car) at the community hall in Talybont. We plan to install PV panels on the roof of the hall later this year which means that we could then say that Bluebell is solar charged. At the moment, we like to think of her as water-charged courtesy of the Talybont Turbine which, in theory, could charge a fleet of 55 such cars.
Yesterday we collected “Bluebell” our new Mega City Electric car from Dragon Electric Vehicles in Cwmdu. Bluebell is one of the two cars in this year’s Talybont car share project. The other one is a biodiesel car for longer distance trips and carrying more people.
She’s a funky blue and, with your foot hard down on the accelerator, she’ll happily pootle along at 38mph on the level – ideal for a run into Brecon and back along the B4558. She adopts a more conservative speed on hills and certainly likes to be fed (see photo) little and often, we are discovering.
We can view her as charged (indirectly) by our own Taylbont turbine…. she may be the first car powered by water! …
Watch out for a bright blue flash around the lanes of Powys…..
This proposed hydro scheme on the Angiddy brook near Tintern was featured on BBC Radio Wales this morning. Hefina Rendle of BBC Wales also visited our turbine yesterday and conducted a brief interview with one of our Talybont Energy Directors, Peter Williams - they wanted to illustrate what happens when such community hydro schemes are successful and the ongoing environmental benefits which can accrue for a small community. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the happy swooshing noise of our turbine in the background. Maybe we could market this as a sound byte for use on such programmes!
If you are keen enough to listen to the feature, it starts at 02:33:00 and lasts 3 minutes. I believe the iPlayer link will only last 7 days.
Reuters (Oslo) report that tests show that the sea water under an East Antarctic ice shelf showed no sign of higher temperatures despite fears of a thaw linked to global warming that could bring higher world ocean levels.
Sensors lowered through three holes drilled in the Fimbul Ice Shelf showed the sea water is still around freezing and not at higher temperatures widely blamed for the break-up of 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, the most northerly part of the frozen continent.
“The water under the ice shelf is very close to the freezing point,” Ole Anders Noest of the Norwegian Polar Institute wrote in a statement after drilling through the Fimbul, which is between 250 meters and 400 meters (820-1,310 ft) thick. “This situation seems to be stable, suggesting that the melting under the ice shelf does not increase,” he wrote of the first drilling cores.
The findings, a rare bit of good news after worrying signs in recent years of polar warming, adds a small bit to a puzzle about how Antarctica is responding to climate change, blamed largely on human use of fossil fuels. Last month, most nations agreed at a Copenhagen climate summit to limit any rise in world temperatures to below 2 Celsius above pre-industrial times. But they failed to set cuts in greenhouse gas emissions needed to achieve the goal.
For whole article see http://tiny.cc/HG91y
Carmakers emerging from a savage crisis hope to lure drivers to electric cars in the coming years, but cost, range and safety considerations mean many are still cautious, holding back from predicting an early sales boom. As automakers showcased gleaming, futuristic electric cars at the Detroit Auto Show this week — some of which will be on the road in 2010 — executives’ views varied on how quickly and comprehensively the technology will be adopted.
IHS Global Insight analyst Rebecca Lindland said governments are the ones pushing hybrid and electric technologies. “I do think we need to be careful that we’re not being overly aggressive because the consumer has not chosen those vehicles yet,” she told Reuters Insider.
Dealership AutoNation’s COO, Mike Maroone, said cost could also be a major factor in holding back wide-scale adoption of the fledgling technology.
“I’m excited about it. Is it ever going to be 15, 20 percent of our business? I don’t think so until the price-value story gets put together. You can’t build a price-value story today in electric.”
Automakers are relying heavily on government cash to make early electric vehicles accessible in price to drivers.
Read full article at http://tiny.cc/Omu6T
We are delighted to hear that The Green Valleys project, of which Talybont Energy is a founder member, has just been announced as one of the winners in the Nesta Big Green Challenge competition.
The Green Valleys is an umbrella organisation covering 21 communuties across the Brecon Becaons – the £300k prize will be used to invest in hydro schemes, like our own one in Talybont, across the Brecon Beacons area.
We are excited about continuing to be part of this loose conglomeration of local communities.
Americans scrapped more vehicles than they bought last year as the ragged economy reduced demand and some major cities expanded mass transit service, according to a new report recently released by nonprofit group the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).
The American scrappage scheme gave consumers a rebate of up to $4,500 for trading in older cars and light trucks, led to the scrapping of more than 700,000 vehicles. But since the incentive was only available to consumers who bought new fuel-sipping vehicles, it did not affect the ratio of scrapped vehicles to new sales.
This has led EPI to conclude the United States, the world’s biggest petroleum user, “is entering a new era, evolving from a car-dominated transport system to one that is much more diversified,” said Lester Brown, the president of the EPI.
Hmm – really? Any thoughts? The thought that people only reduce their carbon foot print because they can no longer afford to continue it, is a bit disappointing isn’t it? Or is that just reality?
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I found this short video a helpful way of thinking about the climate change debate. It looks at the whole thing from a risk management point of view. As the guy says “no matter what happens with the climate change debate, from the point of view of this experiment, we are IN the test tube!”
Our Talybont turbine and one of our Directors, Peter Williams, feature briefly in this short film which we believe will be shown at the Copenhagen Climate summit this week.
You can view it here: http://www.sealthedeal2009.org/psa-tv-series6
It’s the bottom one on the page and is titled “Big Green Challenge” which refers to a Nesta competition which Talybont has been part of alongside the other communities in the Brecon Beacons.
