The country needs renewable energy for the sake of its future - Yorkshire Post Letters

Dave Haskell (The Yorkshire Post, July 6) is wrong about renewable energy. We are in a necessary transition away from fossil fuels and renewable energy is effective and already helping.

Last year, we would have tried, and failed to find 83 per cent more gas if it were not for renewable energy. In the UK, we have reduced the emissions from electricity generation to a small fraction of their historic levels by almost eliminating the use of coal and by increasing renewables.

Renewable energy is amazingly efficient as it turns free energy from the sun and the wind into useful electricity, providing our most inexpensive energy source and benefitting from decades of technological improvements.

It is fossil fuels that are inefficient. They are burned and lost and you have to dig more up all the time. Their use often generates unwanted heat and always results in poisonous gases that cause misery and cost us billions in health-care bills and lost hours at work.

Work will soon be required to deal with the intermittency of renewable energy but there are solutions.

For example, we can convert surplus electricity at times of peak generation into green hydrogen. China has started producing green hydrogen from renewable energy already and other options are also in use around the globe using pressure, gravity and heat storage systems.

If humanity carries on emitting greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels, it will pay many times over in escalating adaptation costs – a tax on our collective stupidity.