SIR – Malcolm Wood (Letters, February 19) asserts that renewable energy is “nonsense”. In reality the attitude which makes no sense is to take all forms of renewable energy together and just dismiss them.
The availability of sun and wind varies. But, think about it, tidal power is about as reliable as you can get: nothing stops the regularity of the tides.
On the other hand, the technologies for solar and wind power are more developed.
They can begin to substitute for the old power stations much sooner than “clean” coal, which can still only be cleaned up on a laboratory scale, and nuclear power stations which take many years to build. We don’t have to rely on statisticians getting every figure exactly right before we accept that the climate is heating up.
Ask the Peruvian farmers whose glaciers have already disappeared. Ask the Australian firefighters. Ask the farmers in the Ganges delta and elsewhere whose land is being ruined by rising levels of salt water.
We can’t be “independent” until we have paid our debt to them and to future generations for damaging their atmosphere. And that means using as little non-renewable energy as we possibly can.
Heather Grinter, Westfield Road, Bradford
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