Wee country can only play bit-part

Indeed, Scotland over the past few centuries has frequently led the way in innovative ideas but, when it comes to implementation of established technologies, I'm afraid that our very "weeness" means we can only aspire to a bit-part on the world stage.

America, usually depicted as the Green lobby's big bad wolf, had 18GW of wind power alone (equivalent to one and a half times Scotland's total generating capacity ) in early 2008 when plans were announced to add this amount every year for the next 20.

In "conventional" hydropower, the score is America 50, Scotland 1, and, of course, America's efforts in other "renewables" also dwarf ours. As a parting shot I would add that if the Scottish Executive had taken due cognisance of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's 2005 report, then a reduction in fossil-fuel use equivalent to the whole of the currently installed, imported, wind factory output could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost.

Dr A McCormick, Dumfries

MY APOLOGY to Barry Leuchars for misquoting his wind statistics basis. His latest suggestion (Letters, 31 January) of storing half of Scotland's electricity produced by the wind component of renewable energy in 2020 could only be achieved by hydro pumped storage stations.

There are three main problems with this. First, 30 per cent of that electricity will be lost pumping the water uphill. Secondly, I doubt whether so much suitable economic storage can now be found in the Highlands (and its use publicly agreed to by such as Friends of the Earth) remembering that Scottish hydro was said to have reached the economic limit of its development in the 1960s. It is my understanding the most recent project built is a special case.

And finally, the capital and other costs of this pumped storage and the transmission lines connecting to the wind turbines – which will have to be prioritised to match hydro availability – will have to be added to those of the wind farms supplying the electricity.

Dr Alan Shaw, Norwich