As a regular visitor to Malta, I am always interested in seeing any new developments and I note that wind farms are in the offing with at least one being planned in the Mellieha area. Wind energy is undoubtedly clean and the power source is endless. However I read in your paper an advertisement which stated that the wind turbine will recover, in two to four months, all the energy that goes into its manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance. While this may be true it carefully avoids saying how long it will take to recover the capital cost of the installation.

In Scotland this figure is listed as several years. I believe in wind power but may I point out some facts from the Scottish experience. Firstly they are big, immensely big. I assume Malta will use the proven efficient model used world wide, which has a height well in excess of 100 metres. Place one alongside the Portomaso tower block and it would dwarf it. Scotland has a huge land mass in comparison to Malta but the wind farms are very obtrusive.

One in my area was touted by the builders to blend in and be hardly noticeable. It is clearly visible from 20km away. One of Malta’s big attractions is its rugged and varied coastline, therefore I would suggest that it would be a good idea for the planners to construct accurate scale models of the installations and the surrounding areas so that people can judge for themselves what the impact on the environment would be. Any land based wind farms would be a visual disaster for Malta.

Other complaints in Scotland have been about noise and TV signal interference. They have also been blamed for the deaths of raptors but I rather suspect the raptors flew into a shotgun blast from local land owners rather than dashing headlong into a wind turbine. As far as renewables go, the present encouragement to use solar panels is good although the big drawback is of course the capital cost.

There is another energy source from sunflower which has been successfully used and that is the solar furnace where the sun’s rays are concentrated by parabolic mirrors on to a fixed point and the resulting very high temperatures are used for steam generation to power electric generators. If this has already been discussed I apologise.

The final source of free energy which Malta has in abundance is wave power. Has anyone done a feasibility study on this using, say, the UK Salter duck generators or the Dutch snake generators? As with wind power, nature obligingly steps up production in winter when most power is needed. The UK government were on the brink of investing heavily in wave power but at the 11th hour backed down and invested the money in, of all things, nuclear power. May I wish you every success in your alternative energy programmes.

David Anderson

Scotland