Significant benefits to UK from building or installing wind turbines are a fallacy

Whilst I applaud the sentiment of your plea for the preservation of the beauty of the Scottish landscape in your editorial (“Economics driving green energy boom”, 17 October) I found much of the content, like most of the articles written on the subject of renewable energy, to be a hotchpotch of facts, fallacies and false assumptions.

You report Keith Anderson, CEO of Scottish Power, as claiming: “We are leaving carbon generation behind for a renewable future powered by cheaper green energy.”

The truth is they are leaving carbon generation behind because they have calculated that the huge subsidised profits to be earned from “renewables” (in this case wind) and (mainly onshore wind) which, with the “renewables subsidies” is cheaper to generate and therefore more profitable.

But he fails to mention that wind generators still require others to bear the cost of the base load dispatchable generation to back up their unreliable wind, so it is certainly not cheaper overall.

You also quote UK Energy Minister Claire Perry as saying that the transfer to renewable energy is “one of the greatest industrial opportunities of our time. Really? Neither Scotland nor the remainder of the UK has benefited significantly from the construction of or installation of over 8,000 wind turbines which have so far blighted our landscape. The Danes, Germans and others have been the beneficiaries of that.

You extrapolate from that statement that Scotland can help the world fight climate change and make money in the process. To use a phrase from a former tennis player: “You cannot be serious.”

If Scotland (or indeed the entire United Kingdom) produced zero carbon emissions from electricity generation, the effect on global emissions would be so tiny as to be unmeasurable. And the notion that somehow the country could profit from wind generation could only be proposed by someone whose sphere of knowledge or concern does not include economics or financial management.

You also mention that wellhackneyed but disingenuous phrase which the Greens trot out in the belief that we’ll all swallow it without question; “as the world moves towards a zero carbon future”.

There is zero possibility that the world can move towards a zero carbon future on the basis of present renewable technologies and it is likely to be decades before that could even be a remote possibility. Especially as those same Greens are so opposed to nuclear energy.

It needs to be understood by the population at large that most of what is written about renewable energy has no basis in fact and need to be challenged.

ALAN THOMSON

Kilcamb Paddock, Strontian, Lochaber