What do a tea bag and a wind turbine have in common?

Martin Fliegenshnee-Jakcht makes a habit of setting light to tea bags.

It’s not a strange form of arson but a way of demonstrating thermal lift to children at the schools he visits to talk about wind energy.

The tea bag, once lit, zooms up into the air – just as a turbine blade will rise up and start to turn as the wind passes over it, he told participants at the EWEA 2013 Annual Event in Vienna on Thursday.

He was speaking at a session on social acceptance, at which presenters discussed ways to communicate on wind energy and to improve public support for it.

Tomas Soderland from PowerQuest in Sweden presented a “code of conduct” that had been drawn up for wind energy developers, in order to show their commitments to “ethical standards” and in doing so get support from local stakeholders like farmers associations, he said. Could the whole European industry join together to draw up a wider code of conduct, he wondered?

By Zoë Casey, http://www.ewea.org/blog/