IT’S great that 61 per cent of people in Scotland want to go for 100 per cent renewable generation (Majority of Scots back renewables, The National, Sep 5).

What’s not to like about sources of energy (solar, onshore offshore wind, hydro, now tidal) that are becoming cheaper than coal, as the economics of mass production brings the cost of installation down worldwide?

What’s not to like about a technology that doesn’t add to the problem of climate chaos?

As the UK Government looks to spend another £6 billion on Hinkley Point, Scotland is falling behind in the race to provide the storage solutions that go hand in glove with 100 per cent electrical renewable.

Lithium ion battery arrays, the production of hydrogen as the starting point for carbon-neutral fuels to switch our transport away from petrol and diesel and solve our pollution crisis.

Storage necessary for peak demand in the late afternoon and evening and when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. With judicious investment, an independent Scotland could lead the way in these technologies.

This is a no brainer – we have the abundant renewable resources, now we need the storage solutions. There’s a market out there. All the nations that signed up to the Paris climate deal are looking for ways to store renewables. Maybe Scotland can provide the answer.

Pat Mackenzie, East Kilbride

JAMES Cassidy’s support for tidal power (Letters, Sep 1) in isolation from other renewable resources is a narrow, negative outlook in clean energy-rich Scotland.

He clearly takes an urban view of countryside that ignores the many communities which benefit from onshore wind projects and embark on their own renewables projects.

Mr Cassidy ignores the large cash windfall from community benefit that empowers many areas to make choices for other investment at the most local level.

He also ignores the hotels, B&Bs, local contractors that share in the on and offshore renewables revolution.

Emotive terms like the “irreversible industrialisation of our mountains” do not help Scots wherever they live to reap a harvest that in truth saw the Stronelairg wind scheme fully backed by local people.

The rules were set in London for our renewables. The success of powering more than 50 per cent daily from all sources is a Scottish triumph. But the Tory obsession with nuclear has blighted even faster deep water, offshore wind development in Scotland.

Even the majority of members of the Mountaineering Council for Scotland are not put off from climbing in places where they can see distant wind turbines. Mr Cassidy should consider all the facts before making such blinkered remarks. They only pander to those who want huge tracts of Scotland to remain as Clearances Country.

Rob Gibson, Evanton, Ross-shire

Then we’ll have to decarbonise the other two-thirds of our energy consumption from heating and transport etc. And then the wind energy will have to be stored using countless pumped hydro schemes orders of magnitude larger than Coire Glas, by which time clearly the impact on the natural environment and the cost of going 100 per cent renewable will be acute.

Two nukes do every day for carbon mitigation what wind farms do one day of the year, furthermore reliably and taking up a few acres of land, yet climate change mitigation continues to be hamstrung by mindless populist anti-nuclear dogma.

Boyd Colim via thenational.scot


MUCH of the response to the revelations about the alleged activities of MP Keith Vaz strike me as disingenuous in the extreme (Vaz 'set to quit committee' over sex scandal, The National, September 5). Vaz and his supporters are seeking to portray him as a victim here – of both homophobia and the tabloid press.

Vaz has said it is “deeply disturbing that a national newspaper should have paid individuals to act in this way”, so presumably he has evidence that such payment was made, and that this payment was the primary motivator for the men involved? It perhaps says something about his views of the young men he reportedly paid for sex that he imagined they would lack the wit to identify him either as an MP or indeed as chairman of the very Home Affairs Select Committee charged with gathering evidence about prostitution.

Joan Brown, Edinburgh


I WAS saddened to hear that Nicola Sturgeon and her husband suffered a miscarriage, an experience that is painful in any circumstances but was likely make more difficult given she is in the public eye (FM’s ‘thank you’ for messages, The National, September 5). However, her comment about her reason for doing so gave me pause. The First Minister said she hoped to challenge assumptions and judgements made about women who do not have children. Surely the problem is not that these assumptions sometimes prove to be wrong (ie, in Ms Sturgeon’s case the assumption that she put career over family, or otherwise did not want children), but that they are made at all. No one should be under any obligation to explain their reproductive choices.

Rebecca Bell, Glasgow


THE proponents of atheism and humanism and their faith in the reasoning and God denying theories of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens is just delusional (Losing our religion ... why is Scotland more secular than the rest of the UK?, The National, Aug 27). Are we really supposed to believe that the amazing make-up of the body with the way the brain, the eyes, the heart and every organ of the body work, that man just evolved from some obscure swamp and there was no creator behind it all?

The God deniers seem to take no account of the great awakening of Christianity in the revivals of the past, and on on our own doorstep the revival that took place in the Hebrides when the power of the Holy spirit swept into the parish and spread an awareness of God that gripped whole communities such as had not been known for a hundred years and there was no room in the churches. They also do not consider the fact that millions of Christians worldwide can testify how God has answered prayer and transformed and saved lives and the comfort Christians can get from knowing the love of God the father. Atheists would probably like to see Easter and Xmas abolished and stop all teaching of Christianity in schools and instead impose their Godless, nihilistic view of life upon us, virtually turning the clock back to pagan times.

J Maclennan, Inverness


CONGRATULATIONS on Alan Riach’s essays on our rich literary heritage, which never fail to impress and inform. And while the recent diversions into painting and music have been equally interesting, I can’t help but wonder if he’s left the literary angle somewhat incomplete.

It strikes me that, MacDiarmid and Morgan aside, he’s barely made a dent in the rich and varied roll call of writers whose work helped define Scotland in the 20th century – which, let’s face it, is when the country truly began to articulate its desire for independence amid a period of incredible social change, with writers often using their work to reflect this.

Surely it would be a worthwhile exercise to take a detailed look at poets like Sorley Maclean and Iain Crichton Smith, novelists like Gunn, Gibbon and Mitchison, not to mention the various playwrights the country has also produced?

This is not a complaint, you understand, just an observation that there seems to be a whole aspect of Scottish culture that is starting to seem conspicuous by its absence.

James Black, Glasgow


Letters I: G20 reactions make clear that Brexit will cause irreparable damage to the UK