40 years ago, a group of people labeled as hippies settled in a slate quarry in Powys, Wales and set up the Centre for Alternative Technology, or CAT. As the name implies, the centre has concentrated on developing alternative green technology, advocating technology which is cheap to create and simple to build, with the idea of democratizing technology.
At first the Centre for Alternative Technology was dismissed as being just another of those hippie time-wasting things. In the 1990s the world’s governments first woke up to the real dangers of climate change, and started to take innovative practices at places like CAT seriously. To what extent has the technologies which were first labeled radical, become accepted? How can we find out about them? To answer these and other questions, Radio VR joined by Kim Bryan, the Media Officer at Centre for Alternative Technology.
What are the advantages of the grass roots approach?
Kim Bryan: What we advocate is the practical solutions for sustainable living. We see that happening in three different fronts. We see it absolutely for the individuals, to make changes in their life and build a more sustainable way of living. So, that can be anything from having double glazing to roof insulation, to cavity wall insulation, to less car usage.
Then, there is a real need for communities to make a difference. And they can be at a kind of community energy scale, like communities looking at their energy usage and working out if they can install a renewable energy source.
And then, of course, various things at a national, European and international scale, where there needs to an impetus from governments and organizations, and global organizations to actually make those changes. So, I think we see that a change needs to happen at all those three points.
So, it is not just a bottom-up approach, you are advocating change right across the spectrum.
Kim Bryan: And I think, particularly at the moment, one of the things that we are saying is that the technology says that we can do it. And what we’ve shown with our energy strategy reports that we produce, which show how we can decarbonize quickly, we’ve shown that the technology says “we can!” and it defines that we must do it.
But there is a real lack of leadership, certainly from the UK politicians in terms of saying “we will do it!” and being able to make those changes. And as we know how the UK political system works, we need the people to kind of urge the politicians to make the changes, because the politicians want the votes.
So, unless we have that ground bottom-up approach saying – look, we want that change, we want that political shift, - then, we aren’t going to create the changes that we need.
Please, give us some examples of technology that you have pioneered?
Kim Bryan: I think the main thing that we’ve pioneered is experimenting and sometimes failing, and sometimes succeeding. So, when we started out renewable energy, wind turbines, solar panels, thermal heat stores, there weren’t a common place and they weren’t really known about.
So, what CAT really did was: take those technologies, put them up and start playing with them, and take them apart, and see how they produced energy, and see what worked and what didn’t work. And then, our workers in education charity taught on courses and we were able to teach what we’d learnt to other people. And that has had that knock on effect whereby more and more people have become involved with the organization.
So, we have a school for the environment where we teach master’s courses. And since we’ve set up that, we’ve counted over 50 companies that have been setup by our graduates. It’s gone on then to work in town councils or in planning, or in government, or in consultancy.
So, really, our innovations are the people that have been involved with CAT, our volunteers and our students, the people that have gone out into the world and turned what they’ve learnt here into something actually much more useable.
At the actual site where CAT is we have lots of different technologies around, which we use to demonstrate to people who they work and what they do. In terms of other concrete innovations that we’ve had, we also built and pioneered the solar-powered fridge for use in developing countries particularly for medical supplies. So, that was something that was built at CAT back in the 1980’es and has been since used a great deal.
We’ve also done a number of carbon calculators, which are used as educational resources for people to be able to see the ways that they can make simple changes to their lives, through seeing how much carbon they use and what they could do to stop that.
And also, the big vision of CAT is a zero carbon vision where we have a decarbonization strategy which shows how we can power down the amount of energy we use through quite simple measures, and then power up the energy that we need through renewable energies.
There is a whole very wide range of things that CAT has done for the last 40 years, from organic gardening to renewable energies, to education and to these wider strategy reports.
Was your centre founded by hippies?
Kim Bryan: We’ve been discussing this hippie tag for quite a while. Since it was our 40th birthday, there’s been a few articles saying – hippies in a slate quarry celebrate their 40th anniversary.
I mean, I think the thing is that CAT attracts all sorts of people. It is in a middle of a slate quarry in mid-Wales. And it does do stuff which isn’t perhaps mainstream. We are exploring, experimenting, we talk about renewable energies, we do a lot of stuff with compost toileting. It is not everybody’s cup of tea.
So, I think eco pioneers, eco warriors, hippies – they are all tags embranded at people that work at CAT for the last 40 years. And I think we should be proud of those labels, because we have gone out with experimenting, we’ve done different stuff and we are still there.
And anybody is welcome to join us. It is not as a kind of strange cult or anything like that. We are very accessible and I think our courses are very professional, and very much geared at that end of the market. So, we really are a wide-reaching organization.
One of your aims was to democratize technology. Have you been successful?
Kim Bryan: I think our work is still very much about democratizing energy and making energy accessible to all. And I think that a lot of the schemes that we promote, for example, community energy schemes whereby the ownership is by a community and the benefit of that energy source is going back into the community.
I still think we’ve got a very long way to go. We haven't got there yet. We don’t have a country running on renewable energies. We know that we can do it and we know that the UK, as many other countries do, has a huge resource in terms of its wind energy, its wave energy, its water energy and the amount of sunlight that heats it. So, there is absolutely a really long way to go. Also the housing stock in the UK, there is an awful lot that needs to be done to bring it up to date and make it energy efficient.
So, we have done a lot. We’ve done a lot in the last 40 years. But the next 20 years are also vital if we are going to be able to make an impact and stop climate change from becoming something that is really very difficult for us.
Do you think it in a way has become more difficult?
Kim Bryan: We were very disappointed by the Conservative Government in the UK. I think we felt that we’ve actually gone backwards, to some extent, with green policies and green deals. And that there’s been a real lack of direction and leadership with regards to the renewable energy market, which, of course, has a big impact on us.
I mean, shortly before the Conservative Party came in, there was the feed-in tariff introduced, there was going to be a renewable energy heating center. And one of the first things that happened, was the Government starting backtracking on those. It was very sluggish to bring them in. And, of course, that sends a signal to the market that it is not stable enough, the companies are unwilling to invest in it and people are unwilling to put their money into it.
