Category Archives: Wind Turbine

Exciting dates for your diary!

Saturday Aug 27th 2−30−4.30 — Local Currency Event

Join us at Old Parish Church Hall, Belfield Street, to dis­cuss how to get an Edinburgh-wide loc­al cur­rency in place by this time next year (for more inform­a­tion, scroll down to the earli­er post on the subject).

Saturday Sept 3rd — Next Organic Market in Brighton Park

This will be the 1st anniversary of the mar­ket and — as well as the won­der­ful stalls — will include:

- a series of brief inspir­ing films from 10.30 and an organ­ic pic­nic (bring your own food or buy at the mar­ket) from 12.30 as PEDAL becomes one of 12 com­munit­ies across Scotland host­ing a ‘Blasta’ event cel­eb­rat­ing Local Food. (Blasta is Gaelic for ‘tasty’).

- a Big Things On The Beach pub­lic art event from 10 called TOXME which you are invited to par­ti­cip­ate in, an event which high­lights the tox­ic chem­ic­als we are exposed to in our daily foods and lives.

Sunday Sept 4th — POD’s Portobello Village Fair (2−5)

As well as con­trib­ut­ing to the light-hearted home grown veget­ables com­pet­i­tion, PEDAL will have  two stalls: one for the Orchard and bee keep­ing group, and one to enable people to ask ques­tions about our pro­posed com­munity-owned Turbine.

Saturday Sept 24th — Car Free Day (set off at 2)

- Meet at 2pm at the Cake Stand at the bot­tom of Marlborough Street to cycle along the Prom to the beach below the pro­posed Turbine site at Seafield, or join  us at the orch­ard any­time after 10 for the monthly work day and Equinox cel­eb­ra­tions and then cycle down to join every­one for the 2pm start.

- This year kids are going to need to per­suade their par­ents to help them dress up their bike before­hand, and we will be encour­aging row­ers, canoests and sail­ors to join us in demon­strat­ing fossil fuel free travel! We may even stretch to a time tri­al: see­ing how well a car, a bike, a skate­board, a skiff do racing against each oth­er if none of them are fossil fueled!

Thanks for supporting the Wind Energy Project!

At mid­night last night our Portobello and Leith Wind Energy Project came in 4th out of 936 pro­jects, and our num­bers of sup­port­ers con­tin­ues to increase. Energyshare will let us know by 12th July wheth­er we are through to the next round or not.

If we do get through, then demon­strat­ing com­munity sup­port is really import­ant so your ongo­ing sup­port will be key. In the next round we will also be able to use writ­ten sup­port, let­ters from experts, MPs, coun­cil­lors etc. so if you know any­one who’d be good for this, please let us know. Please con­tin­ue to encour­age friends and neigh­bours to register their sup­port for our pro­ject. You can see how we are doing here. Thanks again!

Vote for us before midnight tonight!

PEDAL’s Organic Market is 9.30−1.30 this Saturday (see below) , and Eva and I tied the bright Organic Market ban­ners to the fences out­side Towerbank Primary School this morn­ing while the sun was shin­ing. Then we put up the Turbine dis­play and our rough and ready Turbine posters, and gave out leaf­lets to scores of mums and dads — ask­ing people to register sup­port for our tur­bine pro­ject before mid­night tonight by click­ing on the big blue “Support this group” but­ton on the Energyshare web­site so we can have a chance of secur­ing funding.

The response was great and anoth­er 30 folk have signed up in the hour and a half since.

At the moment we’re at 4th out of 926 pro­jects, and Energyshare want to know “Who’s the most pop­u­lar of them all?”, so for them our pos­i­tion will sig­ni­fic­antly impact on wheth­er they fund us. As far as PEDAL’s con­cerned, how­ever, although we want the fund­ing this is also an oppor­tun­ity to get our mes­sage across, to get people to think and talk about what we as a com­munity can do to make this an even bet­ter place to live.

Two con­cerns people have are flick­er and noise (addressed in the leaf­let we were hand­ing out). Our con­sult­ant has informed us that flick­er will only be a prob­lem for a few very nearby houses for a few hours in the early morn­ing each year, and we can reduce the tur­bine speed at that time to solve the prob­lem. As for noise, you can appar­ently have a con­ver­sa­tion dir­ectly beneath the tur­bine without rais­ing your voice, more than can be said for the Seafield Road!

justinken­rick AT yahoo.co.uk

Portobello Beach — it’s always almost sunny here!

Blow me! An urban wind farm

Great piece on the STV news about our pro­posed tur­bine. Also the Evening News has a story on the wind tur­bine plans. (Thanks to all who’ve registered their sup­port on the Energyshare site — we cur­rently have 227 sup­port­ers, and have moved up to 1st place, but we need to stay there, and that aint going to be easy! If you haven’t signed up yet, get on over to http://www.energyshare.com/portobello-leith-community-wind-energy-project/). The Evening News edit­or­i­al (bot­tom of this page, under the ‘Sick Kids’ lead­er) is also help­fully supportive.

There’s also a fas­cin­at­ing art­icle on loc­al cur­ren­cies by Steve Burgess (with help from Justin and Eva).

 

Back our Energyshare bid to boost community power

What the proposed wind turbine might look like

Artist’s impres­sion of the pro­posed wind turbine

A unique part­ner­ship between two Edinburgh com­munity groups has been estab­lished to devel­op a com­munity owned wind tur­bine on the coast between Portobello and Leith.

We would really appre­ci­ate it if you, your fam­ily, neigh­bours and friends back our bid by click­ing on the title in the box on the right to reach the www.energyshare.com web­site, and regis­ter­ing your sup­port for our tur­bine project!

PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town and Greener Leith have joined forces to con­duct detailed feas­ib­il­ity work on a site with­in the Seafield Waste Water Treatment Works. Early sur­veys sug­gest a wind tur­bine on this site has the poten­tial to gen­er­ate enough renew­able energy to sup­ply the annu­al elec­tri­city needs of 300‑1300 house­holds, depend­ing on the size of tur­bine installed. Continue read­ing