Wind farm U-turn the best decision

The news that the UK Government is axeing subsidies to new wind farms (your report, 19 June) is the best possible news for the Scottish countryside, vast areas of which were going to be covered by wind farms if this gravy train had continued.

The Scottish economy will be the first to benefit from the removal of this damaging subsidy.

The only people who will suffer will be the energy suppliers who are often foreign-owned and landowners who have been reaping the benefits of an industry whose finances are based primarily on the receipt of subsidies.

These so-called green energy suppliers have been telling us for years that onshore wind farms were becoming one of the cheapest forms of energy.

Now is their chance to put up or shut up.

This change in policy also affords an opportunity for our energy policy to be based on security and cost of supply alongside carbon reduction considerations rather than being totally focused on building unreliable and inefficient wind farms which have already destroyed large sections of our sublime wildlands.

Alan Black

Camus Avenue

Edinburgh

Well done to the Westminster government for abolishing grants for mainland wind farms.

Hopefully this will help end the desecration of our precious countryside.

I just wonder how may landowners have enriched themselves with these grants – paid for by the rest of us.

William Ballantine

Dean Road

Bo’ness, West Lothian

I’m astonished that you 
believe that the government’s decision to stop subsidies to a discredited technology is wrong (editorial, 19 June).

Unlike the usual defenders of wind energy, I’m pretty sure you do not come from the perspective of a vested interest so I can only conclude that you simply do not know enough about the subject or have been subjected to the propaganda of the vested interests.

If, as you claim, the world needs to switch to “better, cleaner energy sources” then instead of wasting money on a technology which fails on every level, that money needs to be invested in research and development of technologies which might actually achieve the goals set out and wind fails on every level.

As one of the world’s most eminent energy economists; Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University told a recent commons select committee: “Present renewables technologies (essentially wind) are too expensive and too unreliable to make any serious contribution to a sustainable, balanced, economic energy strategy.”

And that takes no account of the damage being inflicted on our wild landscapes and rural communities for the sole “benefit” of generating vast subsidised 
profits for wealthy landowners and even wealthier corporations.

Please conduct some proper research into the subject before you voice such ill-informed opinions.

Alan Thomson

Strontian

Highlands