Energy strategy

Dear Editor

The correct strategy

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – claims made by environmentalists to the so-called virtues of large scale wind and solar farms simply demonstrate engineering and technical ignorance, compounded by a serious misunderstanding of how the electricity generating industry functions. It is an irrefutable fact that due to the variability of the weather wind and solar cannot, and will never, ensure security of supply for UK electrical energy, which requires in the order of 346 TWh per annum (2019 figure). They are also all at sea about fracking and have fallen for all the misleading propaganda, as any geologist worth his salt will confirm – fracking has turned the U.S. economy around – it could do the same for the UK. The current UK energy strategy should predominantly be efficient gas-fired power stations of the CCGT variety, supported by hydro and tidal schemes. CCGT power stations are 60 per cent less polluting than their coal-fired cousins and are relatively quick and cheap to build. For example, you could build 20 or more CCGT power stations, each of 2000 MW capacity, for the increasing price (£24billion) of the 3200 MW Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station. It is also staggering and utter madness that a caretaker Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was allowed to agree funding for a new French (EDF) multibillion-pound (£30 billion) Sizewell C nuclear reactor in Suffolk. What a legacy (nuclear waste and foreign owned) to leave to our grandchildren. Until genuine GREEN generation can be achieved, such as nuclear fusion, then gas-fired CCGT power stations should predominate – of course, there is the potential of electricity from space (such as the Cassiopeia Project), which is no longer science fiction – it would appear that both the environmentalists and Parliament are woefully lacking in scientific, engineering, technical knowledge and skills, to the detriment of us all.

Dave Haskell

Brithdir

Cardigan

SA43 1ER