I watched Wednesday’s Holyrood debate on the attempt to railroad miles of pylons and square miles of substations through north-east Scotland and lack of consultation with campaign groups. The night before SSEN didn’t turn up at a Stonehaven Community Council meeting on the topic and neither did local MSP and Energy Minister Gillian Martin, who has refused to meet campaign groups. But funnily enough, SSEN were at Holyrood, invited by Labour’s Michael Marra.
I was appalled by the ecogroupthink of SNP, Labour, Greens and Lib Dems, who followed the “it’s got to, and it will, happen so the locals just need to suck it up” line. Conservative Douglas Lumsden was calling for a community veto on energy projects so it was one party with 31 MSPS against four with 98. The 65 cross-party “majority” of MSPS who last week backed the Unite union’s “No Ban Without a Plan” oil and gas campaign must have locked themselves in the toilet.
The four opposing parties are so in cahoots on this and other issues – not least gender, education and benefits – they might as well merge and revert to a two-party, first past the post system, with Reform allying with the Conservatives so we’d have a clear choice of the newly formed “Libnatlabreens”, versus Conform.
Allan Sutherland Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire
On wednesday morning, in the calm before the first big storm of the year, at 8.15am the thousands of onshore and offshore windfarms across the UK were producing 0.24 per cent of GB electricity; solar little more. At 6.15pm they were producing 1.62 per cent – and of course, solar was at a big fat zero. Without our 50 gas-fired power stations the Grid would have collapsed. Yet Energy Secretary Ed Miliband intends that the UK’S gas-fired power stations will soon be shut down to reduce our CO2 emissions! He hopes battery storage yards will step in during lengthy calm spells. Some hope! Even the very largest battery plants can supply electricity for no more than three hours, and compared with the big reliable 2GW coal-fired power stations successive Labour and Tory governments blew up, only a miniscule amount.
According to data gatherer Amira, at 5.30pm on Wednesday 8 January the surplus energy capacity across the UK had fallen to 580MW, a dangerously low level.
Sensible people should listen to Professor RG Faulkner of Loughborough University when he says: “In his push towards net zero Ed Miliband is committing us to a miserable future”.
Already, UK industrial energy costs are four times higher than in the USA. Just what does it take for our movers and shakers to get off this ruinous net zero bandwagon? Massive power cuts, I suspect.
William Loneskie Oxton, Lauder, Berwickshire
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