Eco venues
Eco Venue: Centre for Alternative Technology
The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Machynlleth, Wales, has come a long way from the collection of tents and huts that began the alternative technology project in the early 1970s. Visitors now enter the seven-acre site using a water-balanced cliff railway that climbs a 180-foot slope up into the heart of the project.
Power comes from wind and water generation, and organically grown vegetables are nurtured by the recycled waste produced by residents and visitors. Visitors can watch their own personal contribution make its way through plastic tubing and into the collection bucket!
There's a lot for visitors to do, from making waves in the tidal energy tank to exploring the transport maze, inspecting the livestock in the farm or getting a mole's eye view of life beneath the soil.
Buildings on the site are examples of what can be done with alternative materials and designs and none more so than the Eco Cabins. These are self-contained self-catering residential units. Each cabin has living space and classroom facilities - but the real lesson comes from making the connection between the power you are using and the slowly spinning wind turbines outside.
For more information, see www.cat.org.uk
Eco Venue: The Electric Mountain
When it was first opened, Dinorwig Power Station was regarded as one of the world's most imaginative engineering and environmental projects. Nearly twenty years later it has yet to see many rivals.
This is a pumped storage power system, using water from a lake high in Snowdonia to drive its six turbines. There are 16km of underground tunnels, deep below the Welsh mountains. The station's generators stand in Europe's largest man-made cavern.
It's used as a peak power supplier, for example during the interval at the cup final, when millions of people switch on the kettle to make a cup of tea.
Dinorwig's reversible pumps/turbines are capable of reaching maximum generation in less than 16 seconds. Using off-peak electricity, usually during the night, the six units are reversed as pumps to transport water back up to the mountain reservoir.
Electric Mountain is the project's visitor centre in Llanberis, where visitors are taken on the Dinorwig Underground Tour.
Go to www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig/d9.htm for more information.
Eco Venue: The Eden Project
This is the ultimate eco venue. Eden is home to the two largest conservatories in the world. The £86 million project has seen over five million visitors since it opened in 2001.
The project is hidden inside a 60-metre deep, 15-hectare former china clay pit near St Austell in Cornwall. Its unique biomes, or glasshouses, use futuristic technology to showcase the world's plantlife. Eden is home to over 100,000 plants representing 5,000 species.
Many of these can grow in Cornwall's mild climate but others demand greenhouses - and that is where Eden's two gigantic biomes come in. The Humid Tropics Biome (the world's largest greenhouse) is home to the plants of the rainforest - bananas, rubber, cocoa, coffee, teak and mahogany.
The Warm Temperate Biome is filled with the plants of the Mediterranean regions of the world - South Africa, California and the Med itself. Outside the biomes are sunflowers, hemp, tea and a host of other plants.
Eden is worth visiting to see the biomes alone, but the experience of walking through the jungle in the Humid Tropics Biome will change the mind of anyone who thinks that plants are boring.
The project has its own education centre and pilot programmes are operating in schools and on site in order to develop an education programme. This is being supported by The Guardian's learn.co.uk website at www.learn.co.uk/edenproject
To find out more about the project go to www.edenproject.com
