Madam, – You report (Business, September 16th) that a further €6 billion will have to be spent on building 3,000 megawatts of new wind farms, and on the same page, your columnist Cantillon foresees us ending up with “a lot of redundant – and expensive – wind farms”.
Cantillon’s forebodings have an ominous ring of truth. Is there not a scary similarity between our pre-2008 building bubble and the current headlong rush to cover the country with wind turbines? We needed to build some houses, but not 90,000 houses a year. Likewise, some wind energy is beneficial, but there must be real doubt that a further 3,000 megawatts will be either economically justified or technically manageable.
Denmark is commonly cited as the exemplar of the successful application of wind energy. In fact, Denmark’s great export success is its wind turbine manufacturing industry, but its own use of wind energy is relatively modest, by the standards we aspire to. After 30 years of development, and with a grid highly interconnected with neighbouring countries, it still gets less than 20 per cent of its electricity from wind. Yet we, with a grid much less easily connected to other countries, are embarked on a mission to get 4 per cent and more of our electricity from wind – a figure even as high as 75 per cent gets mention in your report. Warnings that nobody has done this, and that it could all end in tears, are met officially with variants of the mantra: “Oh, we will be different”. The hubris this betrays has an eerie echo of our collective confidence that our housing boom would culminate in a soft landing.
This hubris about our energy future has two manifestations. One is the assumption that we can rely on wind for a proportion of our energy needs vastly out of line with what has been achieved anywhere else in the world. The other is the conviction that we can afford to rule out, a prioriand without any consideration of its objective merits, the possibility that nuclear power could make an economic and carbon-free contribution to our energy needs.
The question of whether, or when, Ireland might usefully employ nuclear power hinges on many factors, and requires monitoring of the technology as it evolves in the direction of smaller reactor sizes better suited to Ireland’s needs. But however the pros and cons may ultimately fall, to exclude the technology by law, as we do at present, has all the hallmarks of ideologically-driven folly.
My earnest plea is for a pragmatic approach to meeting our need for a clean, secure and economic energy supply, open to considering all options on their merits. Without this, we seriously risk the bursting of another bubble, and the spectre raised by Cantillon becoming reality. – Yours, etc,