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Written by Alan Shaw
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Monday, 04 September 2006 |
Electricity planning must be given back to the engineers
Thomas McLaughlin (August 31) has summarised perfectly the total loss
of plot by both the government and the UK environmental
movement generally.
The framework of subsidies constructed and empowered in order to
encourage development of supplementary electricity generation (it is no
more than that) by wind power has become the target for every
entrepreneur in the field. Wind power is now so wildly oversubsidised
that the overall driver has become excessive private profits, not the
real needs of the electricity demand pattern.
In introducing the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Inquiry into Energy
Issues for Scotland two years ago Professor Maxwell Irvine commented:
"Energy is an emotive subject and too important to become a party
political issue." It was a perceptive warning.
But it has long since been made a party political issue by Friends of
the Earth, Greenpeace and their fellow travellers. Politicians of every
hue have adopted energy as a vote-catching issue without a trace of the
complex engineering understanding necessary to formulate sound
judgments. Thomas McLaughlin is absolutely correct in equating the
present-day environmental movement with the Cambridge spy ring. To the
UK electricity supply industry, it is the present-day equivalent of the
Spanish Civil War's Third Column. British politicians must wake up,
shake themselves free and pass such matters back to the objective
professional engineers who alone understand the economic and technical
issues.
Alan Shaw |
