WE have just had a power cut at work and as a result a reminder that power cuts are a business cost.

The most likely cause of this was load shedding, which is when the National Grid switches off supply to areas to bring demand into line with supply. The combination of low temperatures maximising demand and very low wind speeds becalming turbines makes this sort of thing inevitable.

For most businesses when the electricity goes off everything stops. A laptop may still have battery power, but it probably won’t have access to the internet or the company’s server. A tradesman may still be able to use a cordless power tool, but only if he has sufficient natural light.

Workers will need to be paid for that time when they couldn’t do their job. Also, when power comes back on everything has to be restarted. For example, we had to call our tech support to get our computers running again.

As power cuts will inevitably become more common, businesses will have to spend time and money on contingencies to deal with that fact. For many companies that will include having diesel generators like in a developing country.

Every power cut is a reminder of the self-inflicted madness of net zero.

Otto Inglis, Crossgates, Fife.

It's good to trade energy

YOUR correspondent DB Watson (Letters, November 19) reminds us that renewable electricity is difficult to produce during periods of calm or overcast weather. But this is no reason to dismiss the overall success of renewables in this country. Over half of all electricity now consumed in the UK is from renewables. By contrast, electricity from gas-fired power stations has shrunk to around a quarter (source: Energy Trends, Department for Energy and Net Zero, September 24).

Yes, we trade electricity with other countries but that is all to the good. When we have surplus power we can offer it to Europe and vice-versa. The lights remain switched on all across Western Europe.

Mr Watson may not appreciate that the UK also trades and imports a great deal of its natural gas (around 40%) by pipeline from Europe and by LNG tankers from further afield. Our country depends on its neighbours for many things: food, cars and smartphones to name but a few. Energy is no different.

Jeff Rogers, Banchory.

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Legacy of academic creep

I NOTE yet another revelation about violence in our schools ("Nine staff 'suffer an assault every day' at schools in Perth and Kinross", The Herald, November 18).

I suggest a key factor, out of several, is that we are seeing a legacy from the move in the late1960s from socially and educationally divisive Senior Secondary and Junior Secondary schools to become Comprehensive Secondaries. At that time it was recognised that the curriculum on offer had to provide a menu of subjects which were attractive to a wide range of pupils, many of whom would wish to leave school when legally possible.

What seems to have happened in the decades which followed has been what might be termed "academic creep", such that our secondary schools today have incrementally acquired many of the expectations and ethos which had been aligned with Senior Secondary schools in the previous century.

Not all pupils are comfortable with the thinking process associated with formal academic study. I suspect that if our disruptive pupils were provided with more success building "learning by doing" opportunities, then the frustration which is usually behind disruption would not be such a problem.

Bill Brown, Milngavie.

When Glasgow is like the Wild West

LAST Friday (November 15), I made a bad mistake. An octogenarian recovering from a recent bad fall, I took myself into Glasgow city centre on an important errand. Arriving about midday, I couldn’t have timed it worse.

It was like the Wild West. Busy footfall of course, but the horror was the number of delivery bikes zooming in all directions across pavements and pedestrian precincts, presumably fulfilling food orders to neighbourhood offices and the like. They’re behind you silently, they cut corners, they dive through green-lighted pedestrians at crossings. One of them clipped the bag I was carrying. They’re lethal.

I resolved there and then never again to be in the city centre on a Friday at lunchtime. But that’s wrong surely? Elderly pedestrians shouldn’t be put off from using city centre streets in broad daylight for fear of being mown down by cyclists.

Government and councils seem indifferent. Will anything ever get done about this?

Robert Love, Glasgow.

Smoke, but no firing

FURTHER to Donald Gillies' letter (November 18), a few years ago, I heard a BBC Radio Scotland interview with a young Scottish lieutenant in charge of the machine gun companies stationed on the rooftops around Glasgow's George Square in January 1919. When asked what he thought would have happened had the order to fire on the crowd been given, he replied: "Immaterial, all the firing pins for the guns were in my pocket."

Derek Foard, Culbokie, Ross-shire.

The victorious European Ryder Cup team in 2023The victorious European Ryder Cup team in 2023 (Image: Getty)

Golf is an individual torture

YOUR Golf Correspondent Nick Rodger ("Yet another cash grab as US players look for Ryder Cup payment", Herald Sport, November 19) writes: "Yes, I know we can often get all too misty-eyed, romantic and schmaltzy about the Ryder Cup and its treasured ideal." As a lifelong golfer, now semi-retired due to dodgy knees and a sore back, I must say I never got the Ryder Cup hype in the first place.

Golf has always been a struggle against myself and my own sporting weaknesses. Even in matchplay, I was only ever vaguely aware of how my opponent was doing and how the match was going which is, no doubt, why I won so few matchplay competitions. The nearest I ever got to sympathy or interest in how my fellow golfers were getting on was watching my occasional partner and often opponent George lining up a six-footer to win the oozle pot, which could win or lose me a small fortune. Golf for me has always been an individual torture and frankly, I couldn't give a monkey's about the overpaid, over-hyped, and over-here Yanks who deign to play our courses when they could be staying at home.

John Jamieson, Ayr.