I WOULD like to respond to your article on wind farms ("Warning wild lands ‘irrevocably damaged’ by push for wind power", The Herald, December 15).
Onshore wind provides the bulk of Scotland’s green energy, displaces millions of tonnes of carbon emissions each year and supports 7,500 jobs across the country.
Scotland’s planning processes are rightly designed to strike the correct balance between harnessing our natural resources to produce more renewable energy and protecting our most cherished and important landscapes.
Record levels of renewable power output alongside a record 74 per cent support for onshore wind – our cheapest form of new power generation – all suggest that balance is being struck correctly.
Claire Mack,
Chief executive, Scottish Renewables,
46 Bath Street, Glasgow.
YOUR item on electric vehicles ("Scotland on the cusp of electric car revolution", The Herald, December 19) made interesting reading up to a point. Governments, climate change zealots and the like are all busy exhorting everyone to change to electric motoring. However, what is plainly lacking in this argument is any really compelling reason why the average car buyer would suddenly want to buy an electric car. In other words, we are seeing a lot of sticks being wielded, but with very few carrots on offer.
Indeed the arguments against electric cars in their current state of development are many. Electric cars are expensive to buy and insure, and depreciate fast, and few people want to wait for an hour or more for their car to be recharged. They are also likely to suffer the same fate as many new technologies, in that with rapid development they would soon be out of date. Batteries are expected to change to solid state technology in the next few years, and most important of all is a likely change to wireless charging. This latter technology, whereby the car battery is being recharged continuously through the road surface, offers easily the quickest path to widespread uptake of electric cars. However, this does require investment, and of course governments don't often want to put their money where their mouth is.
Thomas Masson,
15 Langton Place, Newton Mearns.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
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We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
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