I thank Charles Busuttil (‘Offshore wind farms’, The Sunday Times, August 19) for his flattering epithet of “respected environmentalist”, but, within the same vein, I would have expected his opposition to offshore wind farms to be based on more rigorous environmental argu­ments. Instead, he just visits envi­ronmental arguments in a skin-deep fashion, referring superficially to the presumed “massacre of birds” reported by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

I would have expected Mr Busuttil to also visit issues like the putative impacts on the seabed or impacts on marine communities arising through submarine noise, or electromagnetic field gene­ration, or impacts on the rafting zone of seabirds in the area. The Environmental Impact Assessment documents pertaining to the project will hopefully eventually enlighten Mr Zammit more on such aspects.

I can assure Mr Busuttil that, as chairman of the Steering Committee on Wind Energy set up by the Ministry for Resources and Rural Affairs in 2008, I am fully appraised of the various environmental and other issues surrounding the Sikka l-Bajda offshore wind farm.

Along with the other members of the same committee, we trawled through the reports of tens of other offshore wind farm case studies from the Baltic and North Sea. Our endorsement of the Sikka l-Bajda site for an offshore wind farm acknowledged the environmental impacts such a wind farm would have on the site.