HOPEFULLY readers did not get the impression from your editorial on Tuesday that the alternative to having unsightly solar farms blighting huge areas of Oxfordshire is to have a countryside covered with coal-powered power stations.
Not only would any new power station be gas, or CO2-free nuclear, not coal but it would need infinitely less space to generate the same amount of electricity. As an example it would require 216,000 acres of countryside to provide the amount of power Oxfordshire uses from solar (if we didn’t mind having no electricity when the sun went down) but just seven acres would be sufficient for nuclear generation of the same amount of electricity.
And a nuclear station will provide power whatever the weather, summer and winter, all day and all night, every day, not, like solar, just when there happens to be the right kind of sunlight.
In any case it is not likely that any new sites will be required for new power stations as they would be built alongside existing plants.
The English countryside is too valuable to be blighted with inefficient and wasteful solar and should be used for green crops, not destroyed by green whimsies.
MICHAEL TYCE
Camilla Cottage
Waterstock
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