Where is the science in energy reporting?

I FEEL I must protest at the biased BBC News report on energy that I have just viewed at 11am on June 9. We were told that for the first time ever, coal has not provided any energy for UK electricity for two months.

The report failed to mention the main reason.

Due to the pandemic lockdown, most of UK industry and economic activity has been non-existent, so electricity usage has been remarkably low.

Wind energy was credited with being the main reason for the lack of use of coal. Well! At 11.17am, a few minutes later, I checked the National Grid website on www.gridwatch. templar.co.uk and found that wind energy was only contributing a minuscule 0.48 gigawatts, or 1.42% of the UK’s very low usage of 33.72GW.

Over the past three months of lockdown, the UK has frequently sat under high pressure, giving gloriously sunny weather... and very little wind.

Then, the BBC report stated that Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire, the biggest in the UK, was burning seven million tonnes of wood pellets from North America to replace coal, and that this was carbon neutral... because trees were planted to replace those burned.

The spokesman did not say that while a tree would be burned within minutes in Drax, that its replacement would take maybe 30 or 40 years to reach maturity.

How much CO2 does a tree remove as a sapling?

The BBC News report is being made during a lockdown in warm summer weather.

Will the BBC in future please issue an energy report under anticyclonic high pressure in the depths of winter, with temperatures around or below freezing; when UK energy demand is closer to 60GW (90 GW if we have 30 million electric cars) and when icicledraped wind turbines are at a frozen standstill... generating zilch?

Then will they tell us we don’t need coal-fired power stations to supply desperately needed energy to avoid UK-wide hypothermia ?

We hear a lot about “following the science”. So where is the “science”, or even the common sense, on BBC energy reporting?

Lyn Jenkins Gwbert, Cardigan