YP Letters: Hidden costs to the public of rush to renewable energy

Re the article “Blades of glory set to bring wind bonanza to region (The Yorkshire Post, April 18).

Most journalists and politicians never fail to amaze me when it comes to our energy and power problems. They parrot whatever the green industries tell them, whilst the industry and its supporters interfere with the open, competitive creation that the energy/power market was, and should still be; distorting it with subsidies, tax breaks and even minimum price guarantees – all directly and indirectly paid for by us.

The industry and their supporters, as well as almost all Ministers and MPs, never advise us of the real total costs to us all resulting from the use of renewables.

Wind turbines require parallel duplicate capacity and inefficiently run gas turbines to maintain power supplies during our frequent no/low wind conditions, as well as enhanced and additional power transmission works to connect remote wind turbines to the areas of demand.

Overall, we are presented with an undeclared, unnecessary and over-expensive total system cost that no amount of R&D tinkering with wind turbine engineering efficiencies will ever overcome.

This total wind farm comparable base load system will never compete with other available power generation systems.

In addition, the industry and these same journalists and politicians, never tell us that these UK wind turbines will only save us a small fraction of CO2 compared with running their standby gas turbines alone as base line units which, in turn, will generate a global CO2 saving only an even smaller fraction of the ongoing increasing levels of global CO2 emissions from the developing countries for many years to come.

This renders UK energy policy environmentally totally ineffective – even if reducing CO2 levels was necessary.

We cannot isolate the UK’s atmosphere from the rest of the world. Most journalists and politicians then wonder why UK industries and manufacturing continues to decline, skilled and better paid jobs become scarcer, all our prices keep rising, exports have at best stalled, our debts keep rising and our Balance of Trade is decimated.