We are standing on a disused old wartime airfield close to the sea behind us. The wind off the sea is pressing my trousers against my legs and apart from us there is no one about and nothing much to see for miles around.

One day there will be a new wind power generating station here where nothing appears to move or any noise escape. In front of us then will be a really good looking structure which in some ways reminds us of the Sydney Opera house because of the way it reaches up into the sky. We see six tubular pylons holding up the roof on our side so I suppose there are six more on the far side but they are hidden by the fabric of the roof stretching round the tops of the pylons and there are some panels reaching from the roof down behind the rounded shape which is the ground level building.

Shall we go and take a closer look? We have stopped about 300 metres back and the top edge of the building is some 150 metres high, say about three times as high as a football stadium and twice as wide. Clearly the whole surface of the building is made up of panels and I suspect these are solar collectors. Shall we make our way round to that entrance on our right? As we walk towards it one cannot help feeling that we are going into a very large exhibition hall because it is so like NEC or the Scottish Exhibition Centre near to Glasgow or in some ways the Millenium Dome. Do you notice that machinery hum like a modern train on good rails?

Once inside, the noise we heard has become obvious because the machinery moving as fast as a train is a kind of train with not coaches but undercarriages supporting hundreds of blades topped by a flat ceiling moving very smoothly around on bright rails which we see now and again behind the skirt of the machine just beyond the safety fence. From where we are now some eighty metres or so inside the ring turbine we can look at a roadway set on top of smooth concrete columns and appreciate that the columns are in fact streamlined shapes guiding the wind through the blades.

Looking up and around there is a curtain wall behind us that appears to be shutting off the back of the machine and guiding the wind downwards. The wind is in fact noisier than the train and we shall need to find someone to tell us more about what is going on. Shall we now go back through the tunnel to come up into what is clearly an information centre with that large model for us to view at several levels?

We have moved up to the middle viewing level and now we can see that the wind came in at the front and it has been turned downwards by a funnel shape which starts off rectangular at the top and ends up circular a few metres above the top of the blades where it smoothly turns outwards somewhat like being inside a big bell. In fact in the centre of the machine is a big bell that shapes the wind on its approach to the turbine.

The curtain we saw is actually a rotating shutter like an immense hangar door that opens on the windy side and closes the rear side.

Looking from here we can see that the curved lower building we saw outside is actually a large tube for collecting the used wind and delivering it to the rear of the building. We understand from what is written on this display panel that a partial vacuum exists in this space and what is happening all the time is that the wind cannot escape because more wind is coming up behind therefore as it is being squeezed it picks up speed in the funnel until it is going much faster than the outside wind but also because the building is blocking the way of the wind there is suction at the back and it is this partial vacuum when connected to the exhaust pipe that makes the air inside go even faster over the blades. This is where the power transfer takes place and it is what makes the train go round in a controlled manner.

But what about the electricity? Well actually that is all safely out of the way but between the rails of the train are some special coils and on the train itself are mounted powerful magnets which are powered by a start up generator or the solar panels until the machine is moving at a selected speed and generates its own direct current electricity. Meanwhile each magnet when it moves over the face of the coils between the rails makes an alternating current which is sorted out in the sub station over there. By controlling the wind, the energy generated is matched to demand a part of which is always to make hydrogen for use as fuel. Some hydrogen will be used on the station to drive those big gas engines we passed on the way in. These machines will keep the system moving should the wind totally fail which because we are by the sea is not often. Usually either the sea is warm or the land is warmer and we get coastal breezes when the big ocean winds drop away.