AS a professional electrical engineer of some 50 years’ standing I think I
can justifiably reassure Lewis Niven (Letters, March 25) that electrical
engineering science can definitely guide mankind toward a future powered
wholly by renewables. He is obviously correct to point out, as many
previous contributors to the Letters Pages have done, that there is an
intermittency and base load issue where renewable power systems are
required to operate within a conventional electricity power grid. This is
particularly true where wind is the primary source such as in Orkney.
But this concern is only really serious when applied to single wind farms
or small islands or perhaps to small countries such as Scotland. At the
continental level, which is the direction of travel of the renewables
industry in Europe, these problems largely disappear as power is gathered,
from wind, solar, wave, tidal, geothermal and biofuel sources located in
geographically diverse terrestrial and coastal regions, into a unifying
“supergrid” (see Trans-Mediterranean Interconnection for Concentrated Solar
Power, German Aerospace Centre (DLR), April 2006). This evolving scenario
is a major reason why Scotland and the UK electorate would be wise to vote
to reject Brexit in the European referendum in June.
It is perhaps worth noting, in relation to the often expressed “base load”
anxiety alluded to by Mr Niven, that developments in massive energy storage
(MES) systems are evolving steadily with the possibility of technologically
routine, but infrastructure intensive, sea-level pumped-hydro representing
a significant break-through in this sector. As “fossil-based generation
capacity is aggressively reduced”, to quote Mr Niven, so a Europe-wide
renewable power supply and storage system should be aggressively
implemented. Progress in realising such systems is limited only by the
political will of governments to release or encourage investment.
Alan J Sangster,
37 Craigmount Terrace, Edinburgh.
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