In Bill Watts’ column (24 August, page 32) do I detect special pleading for wind farms to obscure the engineer’s incapacity to produce zero-energy buildings?

People used to respect engineers because they could produce for a penny what any fool could do for a pound. It seems from the column that engineers want to produce for a pound what can be obtained for pennies from a wall socket.

Spot the no-brainers in this argument. Apparently, the renewable energy from the sun produces a meagre 1,000kW hours on average every year at every square metre of the British Isles and this can only be used to do domestic hot water. It is estimated that a 5 × 5m solar collector will receive all the energy a domestic household currently consumes in a year, but as long as the engineers can’t make it work the accountants don’t even have to think about paying for it.

Barrie Moore

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