WE SEE a lot of propaganda from those who make indecent taxpayer funder profits from renewables about how we don’t need polar bear murdering fossil fuels or mutant-forming nuclear power.

I’d like to bring to your attention the status of the UK power system as I write (www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses). There is very little wind, it’s the wrong time of year for solar, and much of it covered in ice and snow anyway.

Sizewell B nuclear station is closed for planned maintenance, Dungeness B and Reactor 2 at Heysham are shut down due to leaks!

Our infamous, appalling, filthy coal stations are keeping the lights on. Thank God. Yet they are being shut down in the next few years – which is fine if there were any sensible plans to replace their capacity with predictable supplies.

Meanwhile new houses and offices all run on electric, we are being urged to buy electric cars, it will soon be impossible to buy a gas cooker; just where is all the reliable (ie low intermittency and variability) power to run this lot? Yet alone the plans to increase our industrial and technical capacity are going to come from... where?

Stand by for regular power cuts everybody, if not to your home, to your place of work which is the grid’s official plan to manage shortfalls.

The monstrous lack of investment in energy supplies by incompetent governments influenced by fantasy science and narrow self-interest will surely come to haunt us.

I’ve bought my own generator, so should you.

Paul Wood

Southampton