Sir, – The last decade has seen the development of wind and solar power into affordable technologies that can help reduce emissions from the generation of electricity and flexible advanced nuclear reactors which can complement and enable higher penetrations of variable renewables in future energy systems.
In light of the present political impact on Ireland’s natural gas supplies, solar and wind power alone can’t scale up fast enough to generate the electricity that will be needed by mid-century; this situation is exacerbated by data centres.
To have any hope of achieving our emissions targets, nuclear is the only low-carbon baseload left to provide a consistent low-carbon power supply when there is too little renewable energy available.
For wind and solar to provide the equivalent of baseload power, we would need massive grid storage: we don’t have it. – Yours, etc,
ANNE BAILY,
Carrick-on-Suir,
Co Tipperary.