Tory Caveman Misses Point

Way back in March I had cause to praise a Tory.

I wrote an email to all of Scotland's MEPs, and sat back and waited for the replies. And waited. And waited.

Eventually, a LibDem told me that there was no point in cutting Europe's carbon emissions, and a Labour MEP told me she was out of the office.

The only person who bothered to reply was one of Struan Stevenson's researchers, who took the time to read the report I linked to before sending a detailed email.

I've thought favourably of Stevenson since then...until today.

He has a letter published in The Herald (third one down on this page) in which he hits all the misleading anti-windfarm talking points and misses the point about where our future energy supply will come from, calling the "race" to renewable energy "madcap".

Oh yeah, and he dusts off the phrase "the lights will go out".

The Tories have had much fun in the last year of accusing Labour of not "fixing the roof while the sun is shining". So let me spell it out in much the same way:

When the wind is blowing, we will send our excess energy to Norway through the North Sea Supergrid where they will use it to fill reservoirs. When the wind is not blowing, Norway will send our energy back to us by emptying those reservoirs.

It'll be a lot less expensive to lay a subsea power line between Scotland and Norway than it will be to build a couple of huge concrete boxes to hold the caveman technology that is a coal-fired power station.

And that's before we ever take into account the advances in battery storage technology and smart energy grids at home.

Mr Stevenson needs to stop thinking like a caveman.