WITH the advent of more and more solar panels plus the growing number of wind generators being connected to the local electricity network I fear the incidents of overloading will undoubtedly increase, resulting in possible brownouts and in the worse case power blackouts – especially in the more rural areas - have you had a power cut lately dear reader, and if so, have you been informed of the actual cause?

It should be recognised that the engineering/integrity of local electricity networks have been designed and constructed to supply power to the customer and not for the input from solar panels and most worrying of all, the unpredictable input from wind generators – can the local transformers and other switching equipment tolerate the increasing amount of unpredictable power input?

Indeed who is actually monitoring the situation and what control measures are there in the local network when demand is high and wind generated electricity is at its peak – will the network and equipment be stressed to the point of failure due to this level of power?

Therefore one trusts that all large solar parks and wind farms are connected directly to the National Grid and not the local network.

Readers should be aware that when the National Grid perceives that too much energy will be generated, the directly connected wind farms are asked to shut down to avert overloading of the National Grid, and under the “constraint” payments process owners of wind farms can apply for compensation for each megawatt hour of energy their wind farms would have produced.

It should be noted that recently the owners of 10 wind farms have been paid more than £3 million each to shut down when the Grid has not required electricity produced by wind energy with the highest payment of £11.1 million being paid to Scottish Power.

Surely all of this has to be the engineering and economics of the madhouse encouraged by pusillanimous political minds that do not have a clue, with the unfortunate consumer footing ever increasing energy bills coupled with an ever increasing prospect of a power failure.

DAVE HASKELL

Brynawelon

Penparc