With regard to renewable energy, the attitude of the Assembly Government once again never ceases to amaze me. ...the Assembly Government is obsessed with the totally discredited, useless wind farm technology. In contrast, the highly predictable, reliable tidal power would be a very attractive carbon-free commodity on the electricity spot price market indeed.

Pete Russell believes we need windpower and that opposition is simply nimbyism (Letters, December 19). He is wrong on both counts. As the contribution by wind increases to only a small proportion of total supply, it will cause serious stability problems unless supported by online conventional generation. E.ON Netz, the operator of the largest assemblage of wind turbines in Europe has specifically warned of this.

One of the knocks against "green" energy is that its generating capacity tends to be too intermittent. When the wind doesn't blow, it pulls the plug on windpower. And solar panels won't collect energy once the sun goes down. But a green energy source that is predictable is tidal power. Charts accurately reveal when tides ebb and flow.

ROBIN Ball (Letters, August 5) has been a victim of the wind-energy deceivers. Those sails in Germany were not producing any energy at all.

If the Government endorses a programme to build new nuclear generating plants, there are a number of measures that might be taken to improve the planning system. These measures could have implications for a number of forms of development.

Compared to conventional shallow water offshore wind farms that cost about $2 million per MW installed, the fixed-pile foundation Talisman project at $5.8 million per MW is almost three times as expensive and prohibitively uneconomical in the near term.

Cheap hydrogen, the most viable low-carbon heat source, depends neither on nuclear power nor renewables - but on gas

A Research Into the Achilles' Heel of the Wind Industry. With a wealth of examples and references, Dr. Etherington enlightens us on the principal weakness of windfarms: their erratic, unpredictable production of electricity. A modern economy cannot afford blackouts, so wind power production must be backed up 24h a day by conventional power, which substantially reduces the C02 savings