Pump for power

I WAS surprised to read of Forth Energy's plans to build four substantial combined heat and power plants beside the sea (your report, 20 July)

without considering that they had the best "free" fuel to hand - namely the opportunity to take heat from the sea using heat pumps, as is successfully done in Gottland in Sweden, and in many other locations around the world, there being several million heat pumps in existence.

Scotland could easily manufacture its own heat pumps with environmentally friendly fluids and utilise the temperature differential in the sea to produce an indefinite source of renewable energy to provide at the very least the 386 areas around its harbours.

Further engineering could produce power and with some integration and fundamental design imagination such plant and machinery could be integrated into much needed coastal defences such as sea walls.

There is a near-equivalent to an underwater pump at present producing heat at Shettleston, using a heat pump in a flooded former coal mine which has been successful, but the marine potential is so much greater.

This begs the question: where have our engineering entrepreneurs gone? Did they all emigrate? I know at least one worked on the Gottland project.

ELIZABETH MARSHAL

Institute of Energy

Western Harbour Midway

Edinburgh

I HAVE noted with interest the clutch of opinion pieces and letters seeking a nuclear renaissance in Scotland (Letters, 20 and 21 July). You wouldn't think there is a national election in Scotland less than a year away, would you?

Nuclear Free Local Authorities has developed a policy briefing (see www.nuclearpolicy.info) to play our part in this debate which we are inputting to the policy discussion sessions of all the Scottish political parties.

We have analysed all the many actual and proposed renewable energy projects planned in Scotland and have calculated that over the next decade Scotland can actually provide 179 per cent of its energy needs by 2020 from these initiatives - offshore wind, wave and tidal.

Scotland is ideally placed geographically to take advantage of renewable energy and it is leading the way in the British Isles. Given this simple fact, why does Scotland need to develop highly expensive new nuclear power stations?

Given as well that a number of Scottish farms have only just been given the all-clear some 24 years after the Chernobyl disaster it seems quite daft to consider the nuclear option for Scotland.

Instead, let us sort out our huge radioactive waste legacy, deal properly with the real problems of fuel poverty in Scotland, have a concerted effort to develop more energy efficiency programmes and, above all, continue to make the progressive moves to develop renewable energy in Scotland.

BAILIE GEORGE REGAN UK and Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities

Manchester