The strange thing about so-called “green energy” proposals is that they’re seldom economically viable. Few – if any – such projects can survive without a government – read, taxpayer – subsidy. This is certainly the case with wind power. But for every government intervention, there’s an accompanying scam. It’s like a law of nature – an inside-out Newtonian principle writ large on the unregenerate human heart.
Take the case of EU subsidies for solar-generated power. It seems that the EU is buying excess power – at absurdly high prices – both from commercial solar operators and private citizens who use solar panels to generate their own electricity. The subsidies are so generous, in fact, that it’s profitable for solar panel owners to shine lights on their panels at night or on a cloudy day. From Anna Raccoon:
You may or may not be aware that in order to encourage people to provide “renewable energy”, EU governments have decreed massive “feed-in” subsidies for preferred energy types. This means that if you have, for example, solar panels generating more electricity than you need, they will pay you a generous sum if you will feed your excess back into the grid. The sum is so generous, that it actually pays people to (I am not making this up!) direct their home lights at the solar cells to generate energy when the sun will is not bright enough. So, people are simply running their home lights onto the solar panels when it’s cloudy or the sun is not fully up, and it’s still worth their while.
In fact, solar power operators were renting diesel generators and selling the “excess” power to the government and were only caught when it was discovered that most of the excess power was generated at night.
I can hardly wait for the scandals and investigations to come in this country.
Related posts:
Twitter
Facebook
RSS
LinkedIn