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This musical instrument is 400,000+ years old and still growing. 🌏 Get exclusive NordVPN deal here ➵ https://NordVPN.com/veritasium It’s risk free with Nor...

^YouTube

Lawrence Weston is a community of several thousand residents in the city of Bristol, in the west of England, and one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the region.

Between 2014 and 2023 a group of determined residents and supporters led a successful campaign to build an onshore wind turbine in the area through their community action group Ambition Lawrence Weston and subsequent sister group Ambition Community Energy.

They did so overcoming great difficulties including a government-imposed, de-facto ban on onshore wind power in England that the UK’s new centre-left Labour government finally ended several weeks ago.

The resulting turbine — a 4.2MW EP115 EP3 unit supplied by German manufacturer Enercon — began producing electricity last year and is already generating money for Ambition Community Energy and the residents of Lawrence Weston.

Now the people behind the project hope to see it replicated elsewhere.

Two of the project's key proponents — David Tudgey and Charles Gamble — believe they have created a model that can be replicated beyond Lawrence Weston.

“A lot of people will say this is a one-off, that it won’t happen again. But they don’t understand me and Charles. We didn’t do it for eight years just for one demonstration turbine [and] what we have codified is the Sustainable Innovative Financial Foundations for Turbines (SIFFFT),” Tudgey, the project development director at Community Power Solutions, told Windpower Monthly.

The pair’s SIFFFT model seeks to build on the solutions they and others came up with to overcome the major challenges they faced with the Lawrence Weston turbine.

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^{RTBC Staff (Reasons to be Cheerful)}

For Pagans, winter solstice is a time for reflection and celebration

Brian Ó Donnell / pod_feeder_v2 · GitLab

Publishes RSS/Atom feeds to Diaspora*

^GitLab

While this year's biggest 'health' stories were about CEO assassinations, vaccine skepticism and scary viral outbreaks, history was being made in the background. Multiple countries declared victory over age-old afflictions like malaria, leprosy and trachoma, the global campaign against cervical cancer reached a turning point, with widespread HPV vaccination putting humanity on track to eliminate a cancer for the first time, and in places like Gaza and Sudan, health workers achieved the near-impossible, vaccinating millions.

Scientific breakthroughs, from personalised mRNA vaccines to GLP-1 therapies, offered new hope for billions suffering from previously intractable conditions, and we saw world-first treatments for diseases like cancer, diabetes and lupus. Most importantly, healthcare increasingly reached those who need it most, with expanded access to vaccines, treatments, and coverage for people in low and middle income countries. From South Asia's dramatic reduction in child mortality to Africa's unexpected progress on tuberculosis, this year demonstrated that sustained political commitment can change the trajectories of entire nations.

86 Stories of Progress from 2024

Not everything that happened this year was terrible.

^{Angus Hervey (Fix The News)}