A commonsense approach to our energy needs

(Letter to the South Wales Evening Post)

Perhaps Linday D Milsom (‘The reserve is the problem’, Have Your Say, 19 October) is fortunate enough to be able to afford ever-rising energy costs.

With 26% of households in Wales already suffering from fuel poverty, and 5% experiencing severe fuel poverty, many of the rest of us are not.

The commonsense approach would be to break our dependence on expensive imported non-renewable fuels and seek a cheaper, more sustainable solution closer to home.

Investing in “cock-and-bull” green enterprises is not about efficiency, it’s about necessity, and about people in Wales taking responsibility for their own energy needs.

I’m old enough to remember the nuclear industry promising us that nuclear energy would be “too cheap to meter” (Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954).  What a false promise that turned out to be.

Just last month The Telegraph was reporting that future subsidies for nuclear power could add £70 to our annual electricity bills.  This on top of the vast sums of public money that are already going to pay for the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency; a price we will be paying for many generations to come.

In contrast, subsidies for renewable energy are being cut, and will gradually reduce as a percentage of our electricity bills as the renewables sector grows and becomes more efficient.

The real beauty of the subsidies for renewables is that individual householders can take advantage by fitting solar panels to their own properties.

If Lindsay D Milsom and everyone else who is opposed to wind farms in Wales were to take the lead in this, and join others in campaigning for a Wales-wide programme of micro-generation, perhaps we could remove the need for onshore wind farms.

Yours,

Keith M Ross

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