Madam, - Your Editorial of October 3rd analysed the recent Green Paper on energy in trenchant tones.
The one point with which I would take issue is your claim that "wind power has been slow to catch on because it is expensive and not a constant producer". Neither of these claims is true, and neither is the reason why wind is so underdeveloped here.
Wind power is actually cheaper at present than the best new entrant power station, which is gas-fired, and will be even more competitive when carbon costs have to be factored into the price of electricity generated from fossil fuels, as they will have to be shortly.
The variability of wind power is another old chestnut, one that ignores the simplest of physics: the biggest the catchment area for wind the lower the variability of power output. In fact, this is the very basis of the European Offshore Supergrid which my company is promoting at present by way of a 10mw demonstration project to be based in the North Sea. It is a fact of nature that the wind is always blowing somewhere; the engineer's task is to capture it. Our supergrid will do precisely that.
The cause of wind being "slow to catch on", as you intriguingly put it, is that this country still refuses to recognise the potential of wind to meet the three energy policy objectives you so correctly identified: security of supply, low cost and environmental sustainability.
The real potential for wind is offshore, where Ireland has the best wind resource in the world. Yet offshore wind is mentioned only twice in a Green Paper of 100 pages, and then only in conjunction with two-ocean technologies, wave and tidal power, which at best are still at the very earliest phases of development.
As for offshore wind, well, it's already a mature technology and you can see it in operation for yourself if you travel the coastline at Arklow. We in Airtricity would like to build more of it - 20 times more - but there is no Government support forthcoming. Meanwhile, we are busy preparing to build a 500mw wind farm off the English coast and will open two large onshore farms in Texas by Christmas.
I haven't noticed that wind has been slow to catch on in either the UK or US. Why is it so different here? - Yours, etc,
EDDIE O'CONNOR, Chief Executive, Airtricity, Sandyford, Dublin 18.