Last one out turns off the lights: Every flick of a switch impacts the planet

Kate Hughes finds that using renewable electricity in the home isn’t always glamourous or easy – and she’s not ready to go off-grid just yet

With wind turbines out of action in the mini-heatwave, the UK was forced to fire up coal power plants (Getty/iStock)

Very occasionally, going green seems to teeter on the brink of being quite a stylish way of life, what with all the minimalism and natural textures.

But the opposite has been true in our house this week. I blame the weather.

It won’t have escaped your notice nor, I suspect, your sense of bitter irony that we’ve had to dust off a couple of coal-fired power stations again because the warm weather has stilled a bunch of wind turbines.