Gas beats wind
A paper from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College, London, makes the claim that “Cheap wind power could see big fall in utility bills” (internet article of 28 June). The problem is that domestic consumers do not purchase power but buy energy and cheap power does not mean cheap energy.
A check on a domestic energy bill shows that a unit of gas is delivered to the consumer at around 4p/kwhour while a unit of renewable electricity is four times more expensive at around 16p/kwhour. In addition, the energy bill will demonstrate that Scots use over three times the energy from gas as from renewable electricity.
The explanation as to why the World Forum on Climate Justice paper claimed that “renewable energy will be too expensive for Scottish consumers hence the financial burden must be transferred to the taxpayer” is because the output of wind turbines forms only 40 per cent of the cost in transferring the output to the householder; 26 per cent is in delivery charges, 12 per cent in customer services costs, 11 per cent is the green levy to cover constraint payments and there is a 5 per cent VAT charge.
The remainder of the costs are the profits provided to shareholders of the energy company.
That means that wind power may be less expensive than the
output from wind farms currently in operation, but Scotsman readers should note that renewable energy can never match the price of gas, irrespective of how cheap will be the output of offshore wind turbines.
IAN MOIR, Queen Street, Castle Douglas
Ian Moir and George Herraghty rightly complain about the huge cost of renewable energy (Letters, 27 July). Renewables can be regarded as a type of geo-engineering, and even if they weren’t expensive, they would be of doubtful usefulness.
Climategate, the hacking of thousands of private emails between so-called climate scientists, shows something interesting here.
Kevin Trenberth, one of the most cited climate scientists of all time, wrote in an email dated 14 October. 2009: “The fact that we cannot account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!”
GEOFF MOORE Alness, Highland