Lisa argues for the rights of farmers to increase their income by accommodating wind turbines on their land.

She points to the unsubstantiated merits of wind power reducing carbon dioxide emissions and its generation of enough power for 725,000 homes.

For quite a few years I was very optimistic that renewable energy such as wind and photovoltaic power would reduce carbon emissions and help with climate change.

What niggled at me were the generalisations made about renewable energy and I felt that zealotry was getting the upper hand.

Recent results from renewable power sources have been very disappointing and show negligible carbon savings and massive costs.

Wind power is often viewed as a very clean power source with the trade off being environmental disturbance to local residents.

The greater good prevails over their objections and I often thought this was a just outcome. Most of us who believed in wind power knew that the wind is fluky but believed that it was always blowing somewhere, so reliable power would be generated.

This last assumption is very wrong.

Reference to windfarmperformance.info shows days and weeks of less than 10 per cent of rated output from all of eastern Australia's wind farms.

Because wind power fails to generate reliably we need the full capital cost of the wind farms, plus the back-up of conventional gas and coal generators, plus the transmission capacity for the full power output for each wind farm (despite the fact they produce, optimistically, just 30 per cent of their rated power output, on average), plus the enhanced power and stability control systems.

Wind power, therefore, does not sit in isolation but is part of a system of wind plus back-up gas fired power.

It is the combined system that results in carbon dioxide emissions still exceeding 500kg per megawatt hour compared to coal at about 850kg with costs of more than $1000 a tonne of avoided emissions.

My commitment to a 90 per cent reduction in carbon emissions is total. Manmade climate change is the scourge of our time and it will not be solved without the full implementation of nuclear power.

Turning our rural and wilderness areas into an industrial landscape of flickering wind towers only prolongs the political "spin" that we are actually doing anything.

ROBERT PARKER

Berrima