And You Thought Our Greendoggles Are Bad

Tuesday 31 January 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

NoTricksZone concerning Germany’s massive subsidy program for solar energy:

Imagine if the government forced supermarkets to buy bread from plain white bread bakeries, ordered them to pay these bakeries a fixed price that’s 5 times higher than normal for 20 years, and forced them to buy up all the white bread these bakeries could produce, whether needed or not.

And imagine if the government also forced the supermarkets to buy bread that was never baked to begin with! All of this of course justified by bogus science claiming plain white bread is healthy and whole grain bread is a killer.

You can imagine the consequences.

Well, that’s exactly what Germany is doing with electricity. It requires power utilities to buy up “green” electricity from every producer at exorbitant rates, and to do so for 20 years. And if the grid gets overloaded on windy days, the wind-farm operator is told to stop producing, but still gets paid by the power utilities.

Unfortunately, Germany’s green politicians here were too dim-witted to foresee the obvious consequences. Now reality has since caught up. The German electricity market is on the verge of collapse. The scale of the EEG Renewable Energy Feed-in Act is of unprecedented stupidity, a folly that will certainly go down in German history textbooks.

Of course this is in a country that, as Reason Magazine points out, receives less sunlight than Seattle on an annual basis. And yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that government officials and the scientists who lead them to support such massive solar energy subsidies are the smart people in the room?

2012-01-31  »  madlibertarianguy