Living off-grid: Scaling up
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2024
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alastair Leithead and his wife Ana moved to Portugal during the Covid pandemic. They live off-grid, meaning they have no access to mains electricity or water supplies. They also have to manage their own waste water and sewage.
Now the former BBC correspondent is embarking on an ambitious project to build and run a hotel, meaning their solar powered utilities will not only have to work for them, but also paying guests.
Produced and presented by Alastair Leithead.
(Image: Alastair and Ana at their property. Credit: Alastair Leithead)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take a walk in somebody else's shoes with podcasts from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:05.8 | Unmissible stories from around the globe. |
| 0:08.6 | Search for the documentary, lives less ordinary, and amazing sports stories, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:16.5 | Are you ready for some magic? |
| 0:19.5 | The borders, our world and edge, my, my, bye, my. Are you ready for some magic? |
| 0:31.2 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Daily from southern Portugal with me, |
| 0:32.1 | Alastair Leithead. |
| 0:41.7 | We're here celebrating this year's opening of the Taliyush, the clay amphora pots of natural wine made here in Alentejo since Roman times. |
| 0:46.5 | The wines are fresh and flowing along with the songs. |
| 0:51.5 | But for now, we're more focused on water than wine. For the off-grid tourist lodge and wine tasting center that we're |
| 0:56.0 | building near the coast. |
| 1:00.7 | When we are living in a city where we have the water cheap and available for consumption, |
| 1:07.1 | we just don't stop to think. We just take it for granted. And then there's the solar energy we'll need to |
| 1:13.9 | generate for our guests. And the technology's changed, the architecture's changed. And now it's almost a |
| 1:19.3 | question of imagination is your limit. But we do have quite an imagination and an ambition to create |
| 1:26.8 | something sustainable. |
| 1:28.7 | And we found off the grid isn't always available off the shelf. |
| 1:32.9 | Our journey to trying to build a new way of life hasn't been straightforward. |
| 1:37.3 | And it's all coming up in today's Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:43.7 | I will give you an example of what is geria. from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:51.2 | My previous career was as a foreign correspondent for the BBC. |
| 1:57.4 | Now, myself and my wife Anna are living here in Portugal and faced with quite a different challenge. |
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