Warren, if the tone your correspondence with Decc was anything like as belligerent as your replies to my posts - someone who's basically on the same side and expressing a a mildly different point of view to your own - then I'm hardly surprised that your experience of them was negative. "Delusional", "silly", "nonsense" - hardly persuasive terms.
If you post a strong view on a public forum you should expect people to hold different views to your own, being bad mannered to someone who takes the time to discuss an issue does you a disservice. Decc's demise concerns me, I'm rather passionate about rivers too and see this move away from a department concentrating on the links between energy production and climate change to be regressive.
Decc, you say, was a place for doing good staffed by people who found the territory difficult, perhaps it would have been better to have been critically supportive rather than publicly denouncing them and rejoicing at their demise.
Departments like NRW, the EA, Decc (deceased) work for whichever government is in power, it's the government who are the problem, not Decc, May's decision to axe Decc speaks volumes.
b119, re the Times quote, this is more of a reflection about the way that investment in green energy's managed and how the monopolies of energy providers work in Britain rather than a criticism of green energy.
Rather than encouraging community investment in renewables we've allowed corporations to build our wind farms taking wealth away from the regions which produce the energy. Take the Varteg wind farm in the Tawe Valley, a multinational's developing the site, likewise the Pen y Cymoedd Wind Energy Project - 76 turbines - at the head of the Rhondda and Afan valleys is being built with Chinese steel ( ironically 'scuse the pun) by Vattenfall, another multinational, they're working in the shadow of the Port Talbot steelworks.
Energy production in the UK is driven by ideology, as a nation we're being let down by the terrible decisions made by successive governments who've sold out to foreign interests rather than investing in our future, our high energy costs reflect that. Have you noticed the minute decrease in energy bills when the oil prices plummeted and the immediate price rises which accompany any minor upward trend in oil? That's how the energy market works, we get exploited while the multinationals get rich, they have got us over an oil barrel now and will screw us for our wind which turns their turbines in the future.
Green energy should threaten these monopolies, it moves energy generation into the hands of the householders with solar panels, villages with their own wind turbines and towns with wind farms or at least it does in Germany, not here of course.
Check
this article, some interesting stuff on how far green energy has moved on in countries which support it.