Bernard is a senior electrical engineer and has sat on many generation industry committees. He writes:

“I unfortunately missed the House of Commons presentation. I think we all agree the we could overcome technical problems at a price. However how do we overcome the political risk ? In the coal, nuclear, oil and gas areas this is dealt with by storage and multi sourcing. I don’t know how we factor in the cost of occupying a country while alternative supplies are built – even if it were possible. Any comments”

Admin writes:

Regarding political risk.

All turbines can be in EU not in dodgy foreign countries.

First of all, lets be clear, the Czisch concept / proposition is not built solely on the assumption that supplies coming from Egypt, Kazakhstan and so on as many people in this group seem to wrongly assume. The key point is that a supergrid be built linking up the EU states including Iceland and Norway. This has enormous technical and economic benefits for all power generation (but not the companies owning them – it introduces a free market which I am in full support of, but they are not), and will make the whole thing more efficient, by allowing plants to run smoothly, and lead to the obsolescing of numerous inefficient existing stations which will no longer be needed and a massive reduction in expensive spinning reserve and hot standby (- this is the key reason why there is no support form the big players – it will strand many of their assets and make it unnecessary to build a lot of the new coal plant they want to, irrespective of any renewables. Just as building the UK supergrid in 1930 made a lot of UK power stations redundant, and forced a lot of those local monopolies out of business.) However putting a lot of wind farms in far flung places is the cheapest way of getting power – but that is only one option!. If we don’t do it, and put all the turbines within EU proper, it costs a bit more, but not a lot. (Mark Barrett has already shown this

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