Pros and cons of wind generation – Herald

I COULD brag about how our solar panels produce all our electricity and hot
water and have a surplus to export to the grid on sunny days.

For balance I should add that on cloudy days, especially in winter, we
generate next to nothing, and at night nothing at all.

WWF’s highlighting of wind generation peaks (The Herald, January 9) fails
to present a balanced picture. I do not expect an organisation with a
campaigning agenda to provide balance. I just hope decision-makers are not
fooled by them. For the record, at noon on Sunday, wind in Great Britain
generated 845 MW, a mere 2.2 per cent of electricity demand. Coal, a dirty
fuel, generated seven times as much.

Nearly three quarters came from gas and nuclear. Scotland is betting the
bank on a generation system with very high levels of inconsistent wind.
This is folly in the absence of concomitant construction of storage on a
multi-GW scale.

But not to worry, we can pretend to be greener than we are by boasting of
the peaks in our highly fluctuating levels of renewable electricity
generation without counting as “Scottish” the carbon emissions generated in
England to compensate for the troughs.

Dr Dave Gordon,
60 Bonhard Road,
Scone.