|
|
|
|
Old & New
Mon Jun 28, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, for Summer Solstice, our Irish
commentator Chuck Kruger looks at the old and the new.
CK: On the highest point of Cape Clear, the southernmost island off the coast of
Ireland, stands a concrete Ordnance Survey marker, witness to the utterly exposed
533-foot elevation. Just a few yards north of this marker lies a 5,000-year-old site, the
modest remains of a Neolithic passage tomb with one of the few Summer Solstice
sunrise orientations in all of Ireland. It’s quite a spot – and my wife and I love to hike up
there with a picnic supper now and then and sit and watch the surrounding waters, and
the mountains of West Cork across an eight-mile stretch of bay, change colors in the
set of the sun.
CK: But there’s a sadness to the place. Just a hundred yards down the hill, to the west,
stand two metal masts, one empty, one with a propeller that no longer has any
function. Back in the 1980s, these two windmills provided the island with 70 percent of
its energy and experimentally proved that a wind energy system, computer monitored,
and with battery back-up to give a diesel generator time to kick in when the wind
dropped below Force 3, could indeed work. But, through some bureaucratic
misunderstanding, this project fell into neglect a few years later.
CK: But now, and for the last two years, when we sit and munch our supper, and look
across to the mainland, we can just make out two thriving wind farms, the silver-white
masts glinting in the sun. There’s healthy alternative non-polluting energy at work! And
Cape, neighbors tell us, has an application in for a new wind farm.
The Weather Notebook is supported by Subaru of America and the National Science
Foundation.
|
|
