Letters: Longannet the victim of an iniquitous charging regime

This means that Longannet pays £40m a year to connect to the National Grid while an equivalent?generator in Yorkshire would pay £15m and a power station in London would receive a subsidy of around £4m.

It is nonsensical to lose such a huge capacity at a time of tight supply margins and it is vital that the UK Government end once and for all an iniquitous charging regime that discriminates against all forms of power generation in Scotland.

To add insult to injury UK Government proposals for the new Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset will see French and Chinese corporations receive a subsidy of between £800m to £1bn a year for generation costs, double the present going rate.

For those who fought to retain the Union under a slogan of Better Together, this clearly did not extend to the transmission charging regime which is illogical, unfair and if we are to keep the lights on in need of urgent reform.

Alex Orr,

Flat 2, 77 Leamington Terrace

Edinburgh.

UK energy policies are having a disastrous effect on Scotland. The cuts in funding to renewable sources and the biased transmission charges against Scottish energy producers is not only risking investment but now threatening jobs and stable power supplies with the closure of Longannet.

UK Governments of both Tory and Tory-lite variety have maintained a discriminatory policy on electricity transmission costs which sees plants in Scotland charged for providing power whilst plants in England receive a bonus for connecting to the grid. This policy deliberately works against Scotland. putting pressure on investment and jobs. No UK Government can be trusted with Scotland’s energy policy and until we achieve independence we must campaign to have full powers over energy transferred to Scotland.

Kenny MacLaren,

2 Avondale Drive, Paisley.

I AM no expert on the energy business but listening to some who claim this status is not very enlightening. Longannet appears to be closing down prematurely because of high transmission costs at £40 million a year and an absence of investment in carbon capture technology. Altogether there seems to be little strategic thinking about Scotland future requirements.

A superficial check on the National Grid reveals it was part of the mass privatisations of public utilities in the 1990s and that the principal shareholder is an anonymous company in the British Virgin Islands. Scottish Power is of course owned by Iberdrola, a Spanish multi-national wherein the main shareholders are Qatar Investments and several foreign banks.

As Greece recently discovered, invasions nowadays are as often financial as they are military and often more effective. Closer to home the referendum was lost largely over fears that the banks would confiscate our money and pensions would dry up. Governments understand organised military force but the financial variety remains a closed book, a fearsome spectre to be avoided at all costs.

The takeover of democracy by high finance is a clear and present danger. Politicians of all stripes must learn to distinguish between destructive financial capitalism and productive private enterprise.

RF Morrison,

29 Colquhoun Street, Helensburgh.

THE efforts made by the SNP Energy Minister, Fergus Ewing, to deflect responsibility for the closure of Longannet Power Station and for the withdrawal of the plan to build a gas-fired power station at Cockenzie to the door of the Prime Minister, fail to address the fundamental and now problematic question, which will now be accentuated in Scotland and that is – how is Scotland for the 2020s onwards to have an adequate, economic, and secure electricity.

The closure dates for Cockenzie (now closed), Longannet (soon to close), Hunterston B, and Torness have been flagged up in the public domain for many years. There should, therefore, be no surprise about any of that. What has been the SNP Government’s response to those well-trailed dates for closure? It has been to approve more and more wind turbines at the UK taxpayers’ expense, on many occasions against the wishes of the local population. These plans have been thrown into some disarray by the UK Government announcing recently that such subsidies are to come to an end.

It is a sobering thought, but the future for electricity supply in Scotland now looks more and more uncertain. It will not do, when electricity customers , domestic, commercial and industrial, complain about power being rationed, unreliable, or increasingly expensive because of imports from England, for those in power at Holyrood to come out with the politically dressed- up version of the phrase “Well, it wisnae me.”

Ian W Thomson,

38 Kirkintilloch Road, Lenzie.