I AGREE with Andy Brown about the urgent need to invest in renewable energy (Craven Herald letters, October 8) so I was pleasantly surprised to hear Boris Johnson make a pledge at the Conservative conference to power every home in the UK with offshore wind within the decade.

This was something of a surprise, not only because of his historically dismissive attitude towards wind power, but also because of his party’s persistent failure to take full advantage of the technology.

Wind power is eco-friendly, sustainable, cheap, and the UK has lots of it. Investing in it is a great way to reduce carbon emissions and energy costs as well as create many thousands of “green” jobs.

But there’s a big gap in Mr Johnson’s plan and that’s onshore wind.

It gets windy on land as well as at sea (as anyone who has stood on the top of Whernside on a blustery day will soon agree) and onshore wind is the cheapest form of renewable energy.

Yet the PM made no mention of lifting the effective “ban” on onshore wind engineered by David Cameron, which has meant new projects have virtually stalled in the last few years.

The Conservative Party are out of tune with their own voters on this. A poll in 2019 by the Conservative Environment Network showed that almost 75 per cent of Conservative voters are now in favour of making onshore wind projects feasible again.

The poll followed research from Vivid Economics which found that “building new onshore wind could save the average household £50 a year on their energy bill” (renewableUK.com 01/07/19).

The same article quotes Survation polling which found that Conservative voters prefer onshore wind to fracking by a majority of 2 to 1.

Conservative MP’s need to start listening to the public about this and should take a look at Labour’s Green New Deal which contains a pledge to “revive the UK’s onshore wind industry and double the UK’s capacity by 2030 to 30GW”.

The failure to develop an onshore wind strategy is a massive missed opportunity. As we emerge from the coronavirus pandemic we need to make use of all the tools in the box if we are to “Build Back” at all, never mind “Better” and give ourselves the best chance of managing the impacts of a changing climate.

Amanda Caven

Skipton.