Sir, - I would like to applaud Annemarie O’Brien’s recent article in The Irish Field as being the first of its kind that I have seen, to give serious thought to alternatives to fossil fuels for the future of Ireland’s energy needs.

As a stud manager who has seen, in the last three years, 70m high pylons cut across a portion of the farm in Turkey and 150m windmills erected 4km (as the crow flies) from the stud, I am still resolutely pro-wind.

To date, we have not experienced any ill-effects from the pylons and, as the wind turbines have been constructed on open, uninhabited land, they do not inconvenience people or animals with shadow flicker or low-frequency noise.

Furthermore, having had low-flying military helicopters skimming the treetops of our land on a weekly basis for the last nine years, I can say that they have caused neither disturbance nor accident on the stud. I actually consider the helicopters to be as educational as having horses get used to tractors and dogs when they are young.

However, having read about and heard what is currently happening in Ireland, it does seem that Government subsidies are encouraging saturation of wind farms, a situation which, for me, echoes the saturation of construction aided by land re-zoning in the Celtic Tiger days. Caution must always be exercised and rights defended, but we simply have to face up to a post-fossil fuel world.

Recent advances in off-shore wind turbines have seen costs decrease while efficiency rises. Solar technology is already usable. Biomass is, as Mrs O’Brien rightly says, a viable option, but we need to balance the demands of such a station with the land necessary to produce the fuel.

After all, there is no point in taking food out of our mouths to power our devices, because in a post-fossil fuel world we will all have to start eating locally. As the price of flying foodstuffs around the world becomes prohibitive, we will need more land surface simply to grow food to supply our own population. One can still grow crops under a wind turbine or a 70m high pylon. Or on a stud farm! I also wonder; if municipal waste was to be burned as a fuel in a biomass plant (one of the industry’s stated fuel sources); might that render such a plant into a glorified incinerator – something which the O’Brien family and other South Tipperary residents (myself included) fought hard to stop, over a decade ago.

In a post-fossil fuel world, there will be no golden bullet to replace carbon fuels. We will have to draw power from all sources: wind, wave, solar, small-scale biomass and - dare I say it – nuclear (currently fission, but Lockheed Martin are claiming breakthroughs in fusion.)

I can hear the scepticism when I mention the word nuclear, but it is interesting to note that many leading environmentalists, including the founder members of Greenpeace and James Lovelock, author of The GAIA Hypothesis: A New Look at Life on Earth (the theory that the earth is a self-regulating organism) are pro-nuclear.

Leaving aside media hysteria surrounding Fukushima (despite Japanese efficiency, one must surely argue that a fault-line earthquake zone is not the place to build such a power plant) a small nuclear plant would be the - to date - cleanest and safest way of picking up the slack when the wind fails to blow or when solar panels have insufficient light. The location for such a plant in Ireland would realistically be the Shannon Estuary or the east coast.

Nuclear waste is insignificant in volume compared to emissions from carbon fuels and the waste can be stored safely under mountains in desolate areas of the globe and, if fusion becomes a reality, waste products will decease even more significantly, as will their radioactive half-life.

One only has to look at France to see an example of a nuclear-powered country (19 fission plants in coastal regions or near rivers) producing abundant, cheap, clean electricity which it also exports to other areas of Europe, whilst remaining in control of the resource and its safety.

No matter which road is taken in Ireland, or indeed the world, for generating sustainable electricity in the future, the projects will need to be properly planned and executed, free from corporate lobbyists and with independent oversight and an informed populace to keep our leaders in line and up to the task whilst keeping the big picture in mind.

The planet we inhabit will always find a way to adapt and adjust to whatever we do to it, but if we do not change our polluting ways, this planet’s future will not include us. – Yours etc.,

ERIC WARD

Izmir,

Turkey

Letters to the Editor should be addressed to The Editor, The Irish Field, Irish Farm Centre, Bluebell, Dublin 12. Name, address and telephone number must be included for verification. Letters are published at the Editor’s discretion and the Editor reserves the right to edit letters within reason.