Solar Panel Subsidy

The UK feed-in tariffs

On the brink of a UK General Election, the Government has launched a scheme to pay new installers of photovoltaic solar panels a large subsidy for the electricity they generate. Going one step further than just buying this electricity, they are also paying householders a large subsidy for using their own solar electricity.

George Monbiot is a dedicated environmentalist who writes a weekly column in the UK Guardian newspaper. In March he wrote an article calling the recently announced solar panel subsidies a "rip-off". True to form the greensmugs started yelling, accusing him of "green treachery". This illustrates a theme of this blog which is pointing out that there are more than two opinions between saying either that everything "green" should be compulsory or that man-made Climate Change is rubbish.

What Monbiot was pointing out in his Guardian piece "Are we really going to let ourselves be duped into this solar panel rip-off? " is that fat subsidies which did little to reduce the UK's continued carbon releases were not cost effective. This article is a good read and will not give any solace to Climate Change deniers - very much the reverse. Unperturbed by the greensmug storm, he followed this with a blog article "There is no 'green treachery' in questioning this solar panel rip-off" in which he is equally unapologetic.

One theme I will be expanding in this blog is the unwillingness or inability of any Government to implement any real reductions in carbon emissions. Monbiot writes on this as well in: "If fossil fuel reserves rise carbon should be left where it belongs: in the ground" The way I would read this is that we will know that something effective is being done about limiting Global carbon emissions when the coal, oil and gas prices slump through lack of demand. Estimate for yourself when this is likely to happen.

Another recent news release is immediately relevant to this is:
"Barack Obama reverses campaign promise and approves offshore drilling" which is President Obama's reversal of his previous environmental policy. The reasons for both these reverses is similar, namely reducing dependance on imported energy. It seems to inconceivable that importing of energy could be reduced by reducing the demand for energy.

I've been wading through some IPCC documents for this blog and it's like reading treacle. Apart from their use of science and the way they draw conclusions, which some people have held to be controversial, the IPCC expresses an unexplained faith that something effective will be done to reduce total Global annual emissions in time to slow Climate Change. What goes against this conclusion is the use of targets rather than real action to make reductions.

The "solar panel rip-off" is an exercise in meeting targets rather than replacing fossil fuel energy. Targets are laced with weasel words to look good and regarded as positive action but are rarely a guarantee of energy replacement. I have much more to write on this topic, but the current UK Government situation, apart from the governing party hoping to continue in power after the looming General Election is that EU targets are not going to be met and penalties against the UK may be on the way.

The solar panel subsidy schemes on the Continent have not been the success that was predicted and are being reduced. In contrast the UK scheme is being launched as a new idea with a chance of a high uptake predicted. Personally I have noted that solar panel manufacturers are predicting something like a 50% reduction in cost in the next few years so I shall be waiting till then to take advantage of an even bigger rip-off.

What this solar panel scheme is hoped to do is to go a good way towards meeting the EU demands without causing a rise in UK taxes. This is because the solar panel subsidy is not regarded as a subsidy or paid for by a tax because it is paid for by a charge on every electricity consumer. Pardon me for thinking that this is a classic fudge every bit as effective as a lie.