Future fuel

While electricity and its production is taken for granted today, I hope that the figures below will illustrate that, once gas and oil have been eliminated "to save the planet" by 2030, we will find that truly enormous changes have to take place in our attitudes to all things using electricity.

How we will generate sufficient electricity after that year will frighten all of us and here is why!

In the good sunny days in late March this year, all the U.K wind turbines combined could, at one point, produce only 1.97 per cent of Britain's electrical needs. That means that to manufacture sufficient electricity for our nation, if you decommission all gas and oil power stations, you would have to increase the major source of power (wind turbines) by 98.3 per cent!

As 12,000 of our wind turbines were needed to produce that 1.97 per cent, then we'd need about 98 times that number of "windmills" to guarantee our electricity supply, which means we'd have to have about 1,176,000 wind turbines in operation! While that might be technically possible, and we'd all be getting our electricity, we would then be living in some sort of "forest" of steel towers. It can never happen! Even the above figures will pale into insignificance once the 32 million vehicles on our roads will have to be powered by electricity by 2030! Hydrogen has to be the logical fuel for vehicles – and home heating, as Fife Council has realised - and both it and our general electricity supply have to come from shore-based tidal turbines.

We are, after all, an island nation and surrounded by tidal waters. Let's make the most of them; after all, they'll work 24 hours a day and in all weathers!

ARCHIBALD A LAWRIE

Kingskettle, Fife