From P.W. AGNEW
Steuart Campbell reports that the National Audit Office concluded that the
money spent so far by the Department of Energy on renewable energy has been
wasted (Letters, 8 October).
This conclusion is certainly correct. But the reason is not that renewable
resources are uneconomic, but that the Department of Energy is
incompetent.
The Danes have a profitable export trade in wind turbines, as a result of a
very modest amount of government support. Howden, a Glasgow company that
supplied a number of machines for service in California, stopped making them
because, at the time, it got no support from the powers that be in this
country; as a result the machines being installed here are mostly imported.
There is no doubt that before long wind power will be able to compete with
power from other sources.
There is enough power in the waves off the west coasts of Britain and
Ireland to generate one-third of the electrical power used in the British
Isles. But financial support for wave power was cut off long before it could
be possible to know how much it will cost to develop this resource.
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In the early 1980s the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board proposed
building the Grudie-Talladale scheme: they consulted the Nature Conservancy
and the local authorities and held a public meeting in a village hall to
consult the local people. In their 1985 annual report they stated that the
scheme was “environmentally acceptable and economically justified”, and by not
allowing them to build it the Secretary of State was “inhibiting them in their
duty to reduce the price of electricity”. The Scottish Nonfossil Fuel
Obligation appears to have been designed to exclude the building of schemes of
this type.
It is tempting to conclude that the government has been trying to discredit
the development of renewable resources by the incompetent allocation of
resources.
Will Campbell please say where are these nuclear power stations that have
been decommissioned (not just fenced off and left), and how much it has
cost.
SCOTTISH GREEN PARTY
