From the North Devon Gazette 7th December 2011

SIR – Last week’s letters from the Green Party, shows how difficult it is to defend wind turbines. Is this why they are not being supported by the LibLabCon, whose policies are forcing the turbines on us, while hiding the cost in our heating bills?

Ricky Knight’s ‘explanation’ of low wind on two days, avoids the fact that the UK’s wind turbines produced just 24 per cent of their capacity in 2010. In case he says it was a freak year, the figure for 2009 was 31 per cent. It gets worse. Eon (the German power company) told a Parliamentary Select Committee, the UK will always need to provide 92 per cent back up power for wind turbines. This ‘killer’ statistic means they are a pointless luxury, because they can never replace a single power station.

Rosemary Haworth-Booth tried to dismiss the KPMG report (which said wind turbines are too expensive), by claiming it was leaked out in draft form. Sorry, but the report entitled ‘Thinking about the Affordable’ was released to the media by its author, Mark Powell who also gave media interviews. I

f Rosemary had read the report, she would know that it did not blame turbines for energy prices doubling in five years, but did say 7.25 million households would be plunged into fuel poverty in four years, as the cost of wind power really starts to kick in. The cost of energy may not be important to the Green Party, but I can assure them, that it is very important to the rest of us. To be fair though, it is also LibLabCon policy to put up our energy bills to pay the £34billion bill for the turbines.

As for the claim that turbines have popular support, she really should get out more. If Rosemary had attended her Party’s meeting on November 8, she would have heard that letters to our North Devon Press are 80/20 against. This answer was given to the accusation that the Press is biased against turbines! To dismiss the Lundy Array because it is 14 kms from land is extraordinary, as to you and me, this is just 8.5 miles. A neighbour told me this week that the Fullabrook turbines are 4 miles away.

The prospect of more nuclear power is not welcomed by anyone, but it is the only practical solution, for the CONSTANT, low Co2 power the country needs, that it not dependant upon World prices. We could be using Thorium instead of Uranium, like the new nuclear power station in India. Thorium is nothing like as ‘nasty’ as Uranium, will not go into ‘meltdown’, and is even found in Cornwall. So come on you engineers and physicists, give us the same solution, or the Indians will have to build our new power stations!

Michael Pagram