Buying Russia’s energy
sir – Russia’s biggest source of income is energy sales. These allow it to continue the war against Ukraine.
If the energy pipelines were turned off, Russia would get the message that the West was serious.
We have a choice: we get cold or Ukrainians die.
John Wotton
Shaftesbury, Dorset
sir – In light of the global gas shortage and the war in Ukraine, special interest groups are loudly lobbying for their preferred solution, but many of these will take years of development and are not helpful in the short term.
Britain’s electricity system is vulnerable to outages now. Winter capacity margins are very narrow and when low winds combine with increasingly common nuclear outages as the fleet ages, we face real threats to security of supply.
There are steps that can be taken to address this in the short term. We should delay the closure of coal-fired power stations, at least until Hinkley Point C opens. We should also ensure that gas generation resources are optimised, with mothballed plants returned to service.
We should negotiate firm gas-supply contracts with producing nations, and suspend renewables subsidies in favour of a major retrofit effort to reduce heat losses in homes. (This will require reform of the energy performance certificate to take account of the condition of buildings.)
Looking to the longer-term future, we should expand domestic gas production and secure new nuclear projects, preferably technologies such as advanced boiling water reactors. These reactors have been built in four years, while EDF’S technology takes at least a decade to build.
Kathryn Porter
London E1
sir – Vladimir Putin has been looking the wrong way. His obsession with re-forming the Soviet Union will lead to Russia becoming a vassal state of China.
It may take years, but the West will find alternatives to Russian resources. Russia will then be dependent on China as its primary market for oil and gas exports – a fuel farm for the Chinese, unable to dictate prices and locked in as the minor partner of an Asian superpower.
This will be Mr Putin’s legacy. Tony Hunter
Solihull