A second cable link will give us energy reliability

It’s all very well saying we should be developing on-island energy such as wind and solar (don’t know why he didn’t include tidal in this), and should not bother with another cable link to France, but in the jargon used by power companies these are ‘non-synchronous’ supplies. In other words unreliable, and not necessarily there when you need them most.

The general consensus is that anything over 30% reliance on wind, solar and tidal will lead to power instability and thus outages such as those experienced recently in UK, as briefly mentioned by Alan Bates in the same article.

The recent National Grid report on recent major outages makes numerous references to the lack of inertia in the system, which resulted from insufficient ‘reliable’ supplies such as nuclear, coal and gas being connected.

Unless we are going to somehow afford one of the new portable nuclear power plants being developed, we are definitely going to need a second more direct cable to give us reliability of supply with clean nuclear energy from France.

It may be that in time, sufficiently cheap storage systems may become available, in which case the percentage of renewable energy available for added reliability may rise but that still appears to be some years away yet.

As somebody with far greater knowledge on this subject than I recently said ‘Politicians may have the power to change the laws of the land, but not to change the laws of physics’.

JOHN BUCHANAN Snr,

Address withheld.