ON the letters page of October 16 we are informed by Mike Aston that, according to a climate scientist, you cannot just “turn off conventional power stations. It takes up to four days to turn them on again, so instead they waste the energy by sending it up the cooling towers”.

On the letters page of October 30 we hear from Richard Durrant that it is worse than that because nuclear and gas power stations “must run at full power all the time”, which leads to the “insane situation” of payments being made for not providing power.

And all this is apparently due to those dreadful wind farms.

In truth, and the content of the letters of October 16 and 30 contained very little truth, all types of power station have operational constraints. As the wind can be predicted with great accuracy for some hours in advance, wind farms do not require a backup “warmed up and wasting fuel”.

Further, all types of power station are paid for not producing power. These ‘constraint payments’ tend to be roughly in proportion to the power actually supplied. In 2012/13 constraint payments totalled £170m of which 4% was paid to wind farms who during 2012/13 provided 6% of our electricity. The equivalent 2011/12 figures were 9% & 4%.

Our electricity supply system is infinitely complicated. Sadly, this is used by anti-wind farm campaigners to provide a great deal of misinformation in their quest to blacken the reputation of wind farms.

DR MARTIN RODGER,

Bloxworth Road, Poole