Solar farm, Gravity machine, Kakapo

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Science

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2016

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

The world's second largest floating solar farm has just started generating power. Built on the Queen Elizabeth II reservoir in West London, it's the size of eight football pitches and can provides enough power for 1,800 homes. Its construction was a race against time, because the UK government cuts subsidies for new solar farms from April. Adam Rutherford talks to Leev Harder from Lightsource Renewable Energy about the project. Dr Iain Staffel is a sustainable energy expert at Imperial College London and he explains the main issue with solar: the difficulties in storing the electricity produced until it's needed.

A team from Glasgow University has invented a portable gravity detector. Volcanologist Hazel Rymer from the Open University discusses how this cheap and portable device can detect tiny changes in gravity in the ground. She hopes to use this kind of device to monitor what's happening inside volcanoes soon.

In New Zealand, the near-extinct kakapo will become the first species to have the genome of every single member sequenced, thanks to a crowd-funded conservation project. Adam Rutherford meets geneticist Peter Dearden, in the Zealandia conservation area in Wellington, to chat about these charming but daft birds, and efforts to save them from extinction.

Producers: Marnie Chesterton and Jen Whyntie.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kiora everyone, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4 first broadcast on the 31st of March 2016.
0:07.6	I'm Adam Rutherford and I'm just back from an epic scientific tour of New Zealand,
0:12.0	like a proper Victorian gentleman scientist.
0:14.3	So on today's pod just for you and especially for my new Kiwi friends there's an extended
0:19.7	interview about the Kacapo and genomic attempts to salvage this strange lovely, quite daft bird.
0:26.1	You know the one, it tried to have sex with Mark Cowardine's head on last chance to see.
0:31.4	More information, as ever, BBC.co information as ever BBC.co.
0:33.7	UK slash Radio 4.
0:36.3	We've got volcanoes and cacopoes later in the program, new techniques for detecting tiny
0:40.8	changes in gravity which promises to revolutionise our ability to feel the earth
0:45.1	move under our feet and the kakapo a strange dumpy New Zealand ground parrot which
0:50.3	has stood on the edge of extinction for many years is now going to be the first
0:54.6	organism to have the genome sequenced for every single member of its species all part
0:59.7	of a crowd-funded conservation project but first I'm standing on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth
1:04.8	the second reservoir in Walton-on-Tems in Surrey. The sun is shining, which is good news, because
1:09.7	I'm looking at the biggest floating solar farm in Europe and it is terribly impressive a huge
1:16.4	array a bit like an airport runway which is apposite given that we're not far
1:20.7	from Heathrow and I'm here with Leave Harder senior
1:23.6	development manager at Light Source Renewables who are operating the
1:26.4	Project Leave. It looks absolutely massive so how big is it? It's 57,500 square meters, which is roughly equivalent to 8 Wembley football pitches.
1:37.0	It covers a little less than 10% of the total surface area of the Queen Alisk of the second.
1:42.0	So that does make it, well well it's the biggest in Europe.
	...

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