I WOULD again like to respond to Andrew H Mackay’s incorrect assertion that
“renewable technologies are adding to CO2 emissions’ (Letters, Feb 13).
National Grid, the company that operates our electricity network, recently
dismissed Mr Mackay’s claims in his original letter as “spurious” to a
Holyrood committee, and have reported that wind farms displace more than
99.9 per cent of the carbon which otherwise would have been emitted.
The recent increase in gas consumption Mr Mackay cites is largely down to
an increase in space heating and gas displacing more polluting coal
generation.
Renewables displaced 51.6 million tonnes of CO2 from the UK power sector in
2015 and, alongside innovations like storage, are playing a key role in the
transition to a more modern, cleaner energy system.
Michael Rieley,
Senior Policy Manager,
Scottish Renewables, 46 Bath Street, Glasgow.
ANDREW Mackay’s useful letter describing the programmes to install wind
turbines in Scotland as a “failed experiment” is too kind to its promoters.
Despite the advice of the first scientific adviser to the then Scottish
Executive not to touch wind turbines pending the development of very
greatly improved means of electricity storage, those politicians in charge
stormed ahead, and still are doing so, regardless of the negligible
benefits in any of the claimed advantages of wind-powered renewables.
Had these politicians organised smaller scale pilot studies before
swallowing the windmill promoters’ claims, the costs and terrible other
damage would have been saved because their near-uselessness would have been
confirmed.
As it is, the Scottish wind turbine “experiment” represents perhaps the
most disgracefully ineffective use of taxpayers’ money, which we can Ill
afford. It ought to be ended forthwith.
(Dr) Charles Wardrop,
111 Viewlands Road West, Perth.
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