The Guardian has a revealing article on the insanity of trying to cut back on carbon emissions by circumventing the free market and ignoring nuclear power in favour of solar. It quotes a McKinsey report that finds that to save a ton of carbon emissions by nuclear power costs £8, Geothermal £3 which it contrast with solar power’s cost of £430 per tonne of carbon saved!
But it gets worse. Here’s the truly insane bit:
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“” the German government made the same mistake 10 years ago. By 2006 its generous feed-in tariffs had stimulated 230,000 solar roofs, at a cost of €1.2bn. Their total contribution to the country’s electricity supply was 0.4%. Their total contribution to carbon savings, as a paper in the journal Energy Policy points out, is zero. This is because Germany, like the UK, belongs to the European emissions trading scheme. Any savings made by feed-in tariffs permit other industries to raise their emissions”"
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~ and as the article points out:
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“” It can’t be long before thousands of petty criminals discover the perfect carousel fraud, bypassing their solar panels by connecting the incoming wire to the outgoing wire. By buying electricity for 7p and selling it for 44p (if you sell power to the grid rather than using it yourself, you get an extra 3p), they’ll make a 600% profit. Amazingly the government has decided not to measure how much electricity people are selling.”"
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So how would you answer the Guardian’s question?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff
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More Pages:
- Solar Producer: Why Not Supporting The Nuclear Energy? (7/26/2011)
- Solar Producer: What Is A Tariff In Economics? (6/22/2012)
- Solar Producer: What Is This Tariff Article Saying? (6/23/2012)
- Solar Power: When Is The Democrat Supermajority Going To Embrace The Nuclear-powered Revolution? (4/10/2012)
- Solar Producer: Essay On Alternative Energy..suggestions? (2/7/2012)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve often thought about crooks bypassing meters myself.
But surely to get paid for the electricity you’ve stolen and sold to the grid would require an “Import/Export meter”. At present obviously we only have an “Import” meter to enable our bill for usage of electricity to be measured.
Surely there’s only one cable?
The same cable surely imports on demand and exports when the householder’s electricity production exceeds demand, thus the “excess” is fed to the grid via the “Export” meter?
It’s not April 1st is it?
This seems like your usual well thought out liberal plan to save the world but perhaps the carousel fraud is a new scam for MP’s to bolster their losses from the expenses row…. lol… but this just sums up the environmentalists so called “save the world” plan…. they don’t have one!
Everybody with any intellectual merit knows that nuclear is the only answer for the proposed clean power problem all the other green ideas although ‘nice’ will achieve nothing at best and at worst could cripple society!
Solar energy is something that makes economic sense in only two ways:
First, you need electricity in a very remote location. (Especially when it’s small amounts of energy.)
Secondly, when it gets extra money infused from elsewhere. This is where the problem is, the artificial incentives lead us to throw money away on something that doesn’t work very well.
This weekend my next door neighbor, a very old retired man, told me he was going to put solar panels on his roof. I think he saw that I wasn’t too keen on the idea and he asked if I might. I said I thought is was too expensive to justify and LA air was too dirty and I would end up having to clean it all the time. I had no idea the cost was that much for tonne of carbon. It seems like such a rip off.