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Professor Stephen Salter (inventor of the Salter's Duck wavepower device which has been receiving government money since the 1970s on the promise that with just an extra few million more he will have a commercial generator) replied to my letter on the 23rd, that I was dishonest:
"Neil Craig (Letters, 23 October) gives a figure of 1.3p per kilowatt hour for the cost of French electricity. This is as dishonest as many of the statements of nuclear advocates. The French tariff is complicated and depends on your connection rating, the time of day and three different day "colours" announced day to day, depending on expected demand. An excellent explanation can be found on Google.
For the typical example of 3000kWh at the cheap rate, 2000kWh normal rate, plus the connection charge for 9kW, the total was 0.11 per kilowatt hour in 2004 . Can Mr Craig say where he got the 1.3p figure?" Well no I wasn't & though they asked me to cut my reply the Scotsman have published mine as their first letter today. Tightening it may have actually made it more hard hitting & after defending myself I still got to make half the letter a critique of the entire anti-nuclear case though I did have to drop an extraneous bit about how greenery is much of the reason why our economy is not growing like China's. "Professor Stephen Salter (Letters, 25 October) accuses me of being "dishonest" in saying that whereas the cost of our windmill power is being cut from 9p to 8p per kwh the French nuclear equivalent is 1.3p and requests that I inform him where the figure came from. I was responding to a previous article in The Scotsman about a proposed reduction in wholesale windmill prices to the grid and gave the equivalent French price, to the grid. Professor Salter accuses me (letter 25th Oct) of being "dishonest" in saying that whereas our windmill power is being reduced from 9 to 8p per kwh the French equivalent is 1.3p & requests that I inform him where the figure came from. I was responding to a previous article in the Scotsman about a proposed reduction in wholesale windmill prices to the grid & gave the equivalent French price, to the grid. This came from the World Nuclear Organisation whose website lists the production cost of French nuclear as being 2.54 cents which does, or at least used to, correlate to slightly under 1.3p. Perhaps Professor Salter may wish to acknowledge his error in confusing retail prices with wholesale
Keeping the lights on is arguably the most important issue in British politics today. However bad the credit crunch may be it does not compare with what will happen when they go out. Nor is the fact that 24,000 pensioners have been dying, quite unnecessarily, every year from the effects of fuel poverty & that this is expected to nearly double this winter, an unimportant statistic. As the previous LibDem leader said on TV "nuclear is the easy solution" going on to explain that it thus must be prevented from working otherwise the public could not be frightened into subsidising windmills. Professor Salter can confirm this since he was Nicol's co-speaker at the time. Reactors can be built in 4 years, excluding paperwork & if we do not have them by 2015, when new EU emission controls will close so much conventional power, we will have massive blackouts." Yours Sincerely Neil Craig
This letter in today (Friday 31 October) shows I have been in error. I have been far to kind to the windmillers. Neil Craig (Letters, 30 October) is correct to draw attention to Professor Stephen Salter's failure to understand the electricity prices he quoted for wind and French nuclear production. But it is worse. The reduction of price from 9p to 8p per kWh refers only to the wholesale price at the wind "farm" gate or landfall. To this must be added 5.5p for the renewable obligation certificate, giving about 14p per kWh compared with the French 1.3p per kWh. The politicians who crowed about a "9p to 8p reduction" were selling a half-truth. (DR) John Etherington
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