How the Station Works

This title is one that graced an advertising feature. Unlike the travel company which writes terms and conditions to ensure that people can't read or understand them, The Green Shop near Stroud is actually writing advertising copy to sell things this way. They had an advertising feature in the Stroud News and Journal (April 22, 2009, page 20). They could have written it in an interesting way but they threw it away in the first sentence, "The Princess Elisabeth station is equipped with 24 m2 of TUBO 12 Compound Parabolic Concentrator panels developed by the German company CONSOLAR.".

So what is this station? Was it one that Mr Beeching missed in the 1960s. Why does it need solar water heating? If you stayed awake in your school physics classes you could guess that "m2" must mean square metres and "Compound Parabolic Concentrator" is a darned fancy name for a mirror. I expect that everyone else had moved to the next column by now. Not many people would realise that this is an Antarctic research station but oh dear, the article forgot to mention this fact.

If you stick with it goes into a lot of technical details about efficiency and insulation. There is a lot of badly translated technical details with malapropisms such as "recuperate the energy" where they really meant "recover the energy". Also mentioned in an over complicated way were the "thermal buffer tanks" and "static water mass". And then it adds a "whereas" that a lawyer would be proud of and the plot is well and truly lost when it mentions that the heat is used to "melt the snow". So where does the heat for the appliances come from? Is it the "bioreactors" that were casually mentioned without explanation?

Photo-voltaics get a mention too where we learn two facts. 1) Thermal panels are not lined with semiconductor material. 2) Photo-voltaics need to be pointed at the sun just like thermal panels. They might as well have explained that an AA battery is not the same as an hot water bottle.

Why these facts are disjointed is because they were cut and paste from a press pack. Plagarism is obvious and confuses the message.

The message should have been, "If an antarctic research station can go green, so can you too with the same technology". But what we got was a jumble of poorly connected facts and figures. Or Epic Fail as the kids would say these days. Come on guys, you'll never get the green revolution going like that.

So, if you want to sell anything then you need to learn the art of story telling, and for heavens sake, make that sure your message is clear.

This is how I might have started the same advertising feature:

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What would you pick if you were asked to name the coldest place on Earth? You might be thinking of the Earth's poles. What you wouldn't be thinking is that this would be an ideal place to install solar heating but this is exactly what the Princess Elisabeth Antarctic research station is doing. For extreme conditions like this if you want to go green you need the best technology etc.......