Tilt at windmills

If the Scottish Tories were actually considering having a different policy from their London boss by opposing windmills, as Brian Monteith advises (Perspective, 5 March), they might also take into account the recent report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation that new gas generators at around £600 million per GW are a tenth of the estimates of what windmills will cost. Those estimates do not include any allowance for the fact that offshore windmills have proven virtually impossible to anchor securely and are already receiving massive, expensive and officially unexpected repairs.

Since windmills require expensive backup because, the weather not being perfect, they only work at 25 per cent of their rated capacity, the amount of the officially deadly dangerous CO2 they save may not be much greater than that of gas generators. Gas produces twice as much energy per unit of carbon released.

Of course if either cutting CO2 or economic sanity were considerations we would go for nuclear plants, which can be bought for £800 million per GW but work with minuscule fuel costs and produce no CO2.

However, with the Brazilian economy growing past that of Britain in the past few days I think we must acknowledge that economic sanity has never been a consideration among politicians of any of the main parties.

It would be good to see the Scottish Tories buck that trend but I am not holding my breath.

Neil Craig

Woodlands Road

Glasgow