ARE we harnessing our wind energy correctly and effectively? When we have far more reliable tidal energy around our coast, are we running up an expensive cul de sac with massive wind farms?

Isolated farmhouses can certainly use wind turbines effectively. They know what their own domestic demand is.

Power can be stored in batteries on a domestic scale.

But is it an expensive waste of time inputting energy from a massive wind turbine straight into the National Grid?

The big wind farms we see today are highly subsidised.

Without the subsidy could they ever be built? Would it be better to restrict massive wind farms to tasks such as pumping water from a lower reservoir to a higher one?

Then water can be released at times of high demand for electricity and power generated on demand for the grid through water turbines.

On the coast we could even use sea water for the purpose and the sea itself as the lower reservoir.

If there is a problem, surely these types of solutions must be an integral part of every wind farm scheme.

Nigel Boddy, Darlington.