Lofty Tones

Tony Allen - with some alternative ways of Turning On!

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pg. 56.

Reasons to be mildly optimistic: the decision by General Motors to finally pack up smoking and start mass production of the electric car. So, too, the news that, as from January ’96, all lighthouses in UK waters now operate on solar power. It’s not quite the revolution, but it’s the sort of information that gets me quite perky and starts my brain whirring. It’s just as well that energy can be stored in batteries (often car batteries) because even during daylight, solar panels are not always going to be fully operational. But there’s always some weather doing something.

Dawlish beach, Devon. Midnight, Mid-Winter. I’m decidedly timid about walking any further down the breakwater. I just stop and stare. The drizzle’s turning squally - a storm’s brewing. Big fuck-off Atlantic waves are crashing all around me. I even have to lean on the wind. This is exciting. This is dangerous, I could turn into a cheap provincial news item. I carefully make my way back to my mates sheltering under the rail viaduct where Dawlish Water, the town’s river, is roaring through a culvert and torrenting onto the beach and into the Ocean. It’s powerful stuff. Yet twinkling through the downpour, red and yellow and orange and blue, are battered little festoons of sea front fairylights... plugged into the National Grid.

It clearly can’t be an original idea to use an alternative, local energy source to power such a modest rig, it’s got to be cheaper, and there’s so many possible energy sources - the wind, the sea, the river... Thinking about it, a self similar situation probably exists in coastal resorts literally all around the country. What an opportunity to politicise both residents and tourists. The promise of cheaper council tax must surely turn some of them into raving eco-warriors, or at least advocates of alternative energy. Although traditional energy is maybe a better phrase - the monks of Adleborough monastery on the East Anglian coast apparently have a system of trapping the high tide and using the head of water to power their flour mill. It dates back to the fourteenth century.

The more you think about these ideas the wackier they get. Well that’s how it is with me anyway. Pieso electric strip carpeting the dual carriageways (see Squall 10); armies of adolescents peddling away on Rinky Dink style cycle power machines (see Squall 11); in fact anywhere there’s movement, theoretically, energy can be harnessed. Something as simple as a regularly used farm gate can be utilised to gently trickle-charge a twelve volt battery; and as for the possibilities in a children’s playground. Gain on the swings and gain on the roundabouts.

But the image that lingers longest with me is all the seaside illuminations of our little offshore island being successfully powered by low-tech Heath Robinson kinetic sculpture. It’s playful and it’s got the common touch, Johnny and Joanne punter will take to it like a duct to…. Stop me someone! I feel a millennium project coming on.