May I say straight away that though we are totally involved in green matters the name is the real name of the Lovegreen family. There are not many of us and we are all descendants of one Swedish family, a branch of which came to the UK several hundred years ago and settled in the City of Durham. Two of the brothers were ship builders and others were farmers and shoe and harness makers all were good seaman and good horsemen. Nowadays there are about ten families in the UK, just over two hundred in the USA and four in Australia. The original name was Lofgren with two dots over the 'o' the present spelling is the best the registrar of the 1600's could do. Or so we are given to believe.

This school has been a long time developing. Nearly sixty years ago while examining a river to make sure I was not polluting it from an experiment I came across one of our very best scientists sitting on the parapet of a small hump backed bridge. I greeted him and asked if he was having a day off. 'Unfortunately no' he said 'all I need is my brain and somewhere to sit so why not here and work in this lovely setting?'

This school is also a place for thinking and at this time the thinking is to be about how to design and build a new kind of wind turbine so that we may stop the proliferation of wind turbines on towers across our country. Where you sit while you work with us is entirely up to you. There are no set hours but we hope everyone will be courteous, precise in thinking and accurate with calculations. There is no one solution to this problem. I have set out some thoughts that, as I judge today's engineering, are within reasonable limits of design and materials technology

Of necessity we hope you will select a simple grading system. If you are a professional person with high qualifications and capable of arguing a case and supporting it properly would you please register in the Professional part of the membership form.

If you would classify yourself as being a very interested person who would like to contribute other kinds of discussion say politics, or medicine, matters of green issues or other related fields then please chose the general category.

It is important to realise that you will not be talking just to me but to every other member.

We have set up some very important and useful links as you can see on my left.

On matters of design and drawings we have been fortunate in the I came across an American CAD freebie programme and started to use it because having given away all my design office equipment I had little more than a pencil and some A4 paper. Since then I have been in negotiation with the British agents for F.I.T. Corporation and steps are being taken to make a later version of Cadvance available at reasonable terms to everyone which means that we have a common drawing method which runs in Windows 95 and later and which uses ordinary printers though these may be A3, A2 or even A1 if you wish.

Alan Lovegreen
Lochwinnoch August 2006

You can read more about Alan at his personal site alantrevorlovegreen.co.uk.