Cool moves

Schumacher College is a cradle of innovation and inspiration that has inspired countless actions on climate and sustainability. In addition to the energy that shines from the courses and workshops that run at the College, an incredible range of people congregate there to share learning, ideas and time with like minded others. Whilst facilitating a course there a few years back, I met with David Hirst, who at the time was developing a simple, powerful device to switch off fridges when the electricity grid experienced a spike. It's take a few years for David to get the support that was needed, and I was delighted today to see an article in The Guardian which highlighted the results that are now appearing:

"Some good scientific modelling work has been done on this, which suggests that if each of the three million domestic fridges sold in the UK every year were fitted with this technology (known as 'dynamic demand'), then the equivalent electrical response of all these units would be 35 megawatts – the size of a small wind farm. If, however, all of the UK's 40 million fridges were eventually replaced with dynamic demand units, then the response level would rise to between 728 and 1,174 megawatts – a level that RLtec claims would make an entire spinning reserve power plant obsolete". Congratulations, David. You're a Doer.