Monday
Apr112011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Solar looters get more loot
Apr 11, 2011 Energy Having fleeced taxpayers once by offering crazy feed in tariffs to solar power companies, DECC is now going to fleece them once again by offering compensation now the subsidies have been somewhat reined in. Huhne really is stark raving mad isn't he?
Reader Comments (37)
NO compensation should be paid. These 'renewables' companies aren't in the least interested in how 'green' their projects are - only what nice fat Feed In Tariffs they can get. Well - sorry - the chickens have come home to roost - because the FITs are unaffordable.
The next step should be to remove any tax incentives and Renewable Obligation Certificates for wind farms - if they are so wonderful (not) - then they should be able to stand on their own two feet, as it were. Chris Huhne made it clear a while ago that any new nuclear generating capacity would not get any public money in support - the same should apply to solar and wind.
The comments on that article make interesting reading, ie
"We had £120m of bank funding lined up so that we could build out 10 of our own projects, using local labour, and owning the assets for the long term along with the O&M contracts."
"We have raised a further £1.4m of equity (private equity as opposed to venture capital), all of which may be lost without transition.
I personally quit my full time salaried job to work at risk in expectation of a reward upon project execution."
If these projects haven't actually gone ahead, then why would they have incurred those losses? Some compensation for actual losses incurred to date may be cheaper than legal action but not for loss of profits. Personally I'd pay nothing and sue the solar industry for false marketing.
That's why it's called "risk", diddums.
Sounds to me like somebody thought the world owed him a living.
Correction -- someone thought the taxpayer owed him a living. But then I suppose, given the amount sluiced down the climate change cesspit, it might have been a reasonable belief!
Anyone for shares in the Green bank, hehehehe!
There is more chance of making money selling barge poles, because that is the only way that you should touch anything that this government is involved in.
Being ripped off (fleeced) by your government is a crime against humanity.
Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings. ...
Remind me again who it was that appointed Huhne, and whose father-in-law is a wealthy wind farmer and who wants this to be the 'Greenest Government ever'.
For the moment the name escapes me, but isn't it 'Dave' somebody ?
Asylum, lunatics, running. Hmm theres a well known phrase in there somewhere if I could just remember how it goes.
:)
"they were encouraged .. by the government to help combat green house gases by investing in solar energy"
And if it can be shown that they don't combat GHG's, because their production uses more than they 'save' (especially in the UK)?
BTW, I thought there was no money left? Silly me - it's money that we haven't earned yet...
These are probably the same people who get taken in by Ponzi and other "get rich quick" schemes.
Stupidity and greed, often a fatal combination.
How does the saying go? "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is".
"He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon", or a barge pole as Lord B advocates. Serve the greedy bar stewards right for trying to fleece taxpayers and electricity consumers. No compensation should be paid by those running the asylum.
I fell about laughing at the the last bleat "helicoptor and light aircraft chartered"
Do these people live in some kind of parallel universe?
Be fair Bish! You have to take care of the financial arrangements of relatives!
Green. Adjective; easily led or deceived; simple; naive.
Sam, I had a similar experience with risk many years ago - started a weekly tabloid-format newspaper for a niche market which 'couldn't go wrong'. The paper is still going but it spat me out in 18 months from startup after I exhausted myself and all of my financial resources. Working silly hours and paying money to do it can only last so long.
Paying compensation to people who 'took a flyer' in the expectation of making a bundle when their scheme wouldn't work without large subsidies proves Huhne's hunacy. His reverse Robin Hooding, robbing the poor to pay the rich, is beyonf parody or belief..
Curses, I quite fancied solar farming. I'll have to go back to selling seagulls (that one's yours!).
"We had £120m of bank funding lined up so that we could build out 10 of our own projects, using local labour, and owning the assets for the long term along with the O&M contracts."
"We have raised a further £1.4m of equity (private equity as opposed to venture capital), all of which may be lost without transition."
That is a hell of a gearing ratio. And, if true which I doubt frankly, shows that the lenders had assessd the deals as having no risk. Or to put it another way. The FIT is far more generous than it should be.
Others have noted above that 'risk' means exactly that.
'Greed' is also a useful word to consider in this context, as is 'hypocrisy'.
None of these entitled-sounding moaners seems to have the slightest awareness of how their profit was to be funded. Anyone willing to profit from the FIT system but not acknowledge that ultimately it operates as stealth regressive tax gets no sympathy from me.
The lesson from this is more serious than most of the comments. The problem is that feed-in tariffs are a way of raising the costs of generating companies. When this happens, prices rise. This then produces fuel poverty.
Because small installations can generate only tiny gross amounts of electricity, all the additional electricity costs go to large investors who put up solar or wind farms.
The problem is, these guys have few votes. Everyone who pays an electricity bill votes. So when push comes to shove, and we end up simply raising the costs of the electricity companies and therefore the prices the electorate pays, what will give is the feedin tariffs.
This is why it is completely idiotic to bet on feedin tariffs remaining in any form longer than another 5 years. They will go. The faster they promote alternative energy = high priced electricity, the faster they will go.
This is a public policy proposition which is self defeating. The more it succeeds, the faster it gets abolished.
michel
I am as serious as cancer when it comes to the social harm done by enforced subsidy of renewables.
Nor do I share your rather glib optimism that the whole nightmarish policy failure will just disappear in a few years time.
The sheer scale of the UK government's stated commitment to renewables (principally offshore wind) is such that revising energy policy in the short term will be extremely difficult. There is too much hidden vested interest (imagine the head post re-written to describe the howling for compensation by the wind industry...).
Finally, a public admission that renewables are not the big levers in emissions reduction policy would leave policy makers with ... well, not much on the table.
it was good while it lasted. .If I pay my electricity company 13-14p per unit but they have to pay a FIT of 44p....then it could never work long-term unless either the FIT reduces to less than 13p or the electricity company charges me more than 44p!
@BBD
"Finally, a public admission that renewables are not the big levers in emissions reduction policy would leave policy makers with ... well, not much on the table."
This is absolutely right. And they could start by producing a very simple calculation, using IPCC figures and their worst "scenario", to show how much global warming would be avoided if these scams were 100% as successful as their snakeoil salesmen proposers pretend. And then point out actual measured outputs and what the even more infinitesimal outcome is then.
The answer, as we all know, is that the temperature rise 'avoided' would be absolutely unmeasurable.
But would BuffHuhne or Dave Boy or Captain Clegg or Eddie Milipede confess this even if waterboarded? Absolutely no way. I've more chance of fixing up a steamy session with Keira Knightley.
Would the Royal Society admit they had been hoodwinked?
How would the Grauniad report it?
What would the Beeb say?
I fear we may have to wait until these dimwits have died. ('Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.)
But how much damage will have been done by then?
Just goes to show again that reliance on government-backed contracts never, ever, produced a solid business model. Simples.
@ michel
I see your point but disagree - I think these stealth taxes will remain in place for ever.
The immediate blame for them will accrue to the utilities. If they try to point out that the electricity price is massively inflating owing to ecofascist taxes, they will simply be punished, probably by things like OFT inquiries into their pricing, and other forms of judicial harassment. It's what used to happen to oil companies if ever they were tactless enough to point out that most of the retail price of petrol is tax.
After a few years the revenue from this will be spent and factored into government spending planning in perpetuity. Anyone who then notes that CAGW has been shown to be a massive error, and goes on to argue thus that the taxes should be repealed, will simply be challenged to identify which schools and hospitals should close to pay for this "tax cut".
Governments will probably dismount from their averred belief in ecolunacy quite rapidly when it happens, but I see no reason to think the taxes will ever go away. Income tax came in as a temporary measure to pay for the Napoleonic wars and it has taken 200 years not to go away yet.
Jonathan Swift, a prescient man. From Gulliver's Travels.
The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor's gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me "to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers."
'It was a toss up between sending a nice Nigerian man some money so that he could use my account, or making a lot of money from the taxpayer by giving a farmer friend of mine a good bung so that I could plaster one of his fields with solar panels. I thought the solar thing was just too good to pass up - and now the nasty government has slashed the money I was going to make - and my farmer friend wants to grow FOOD or something on his land. Life is SOOOO unfair...'
@ Alan Reed
'adopt a seagull' LOL
BBC will be first in line :-)
what a brilliant idea, you could make a fortune (for charity naturally).
O/T but this is what happens if u believe Tim Flannery's prophesies for Australia, rather than the weather forecasts which predicted heavy La Nina rainfalls for Brisbane. the actions/inactions of the Wivenhoe Dam operators are believed to have contributed mightily to the costly Brisbane floods :
12 April: Sydney Morning Herald, Australia: Daniel Hurst: Dam operators banked on no rain, inquiry hears
The engineers operating southeast Queensland’s biggest dam in the lead up to the Brisbane flood based their decisions on no further rain flowing into the dam, an inquiry heard yesterday…
Senior Wivenhoe (Dam) engineer Rob Ayre was quizzed on why his team did not rely heavily on rainfall forecasts when managing water releases into Brisbane River ahead of the city’s flood peak on January 13.
Mr Ayre said rainfall predictions were volatile and he believed it was best to rely on a no-rainfall scenario when managing the dam.
“It’s been proven to be the most reliable in the past,” he said…
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/dam-operators-banked-on-no-rain-inquiry-hears-20110411-1daw0.html
insanity?
It is well worth reading the Regulatory Impact Assessments in 2009 on the introduction of Feed in Tariffs and then in 2011 on the blocking of solar farmers.
The former shows the cost far exceeding the environmental benefit, while the latter shows the saving from not over-subsidising the more efficient solar (but apparently still subsidising the less efficient domestic schemes).
Did they have signed contracts for their expectations with HMG?
If not, the risk lies with them.
"...The first man...has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers..." --View from the Solent
Shush, View, shush! If the UK government finds out that these are low carbon sources, they'll give UEA £100 billion to pursue this scheme!
"But would BuffHuhne or Dave Boy or Captain Clegg or Eddie Milipede confess this even if waterboarded? Absolutely no way. I've more chance of fixing up a steamy session with Keira Knightley."
I've got a board, a sack, a bucket of water, and Keira Knightley's phone number- if you can arrange a trade I'd love to test the theory ;^)
What does it say at the bottom of all financial investment advertisements..?
'Investments/shares can go down as well as up...'
Isn't this just typical Huhne behaviour - 'no subsidies for nuclear generation' - because it's useful.
Big subsidies for sun and wind - because they're useless!
Oops, some of my 'green-ish' pals have caught a cold - 'dig deep you taxpayers, this can't be allowed'.
Apr 12, 2011 at 2:13 AM | Henry
Regulatory Impact Assessments - 35 pages and 21 pages - more taxpayers' money hosed up the wall.
Perhaps if Lily Tang and her mates have some time on their hands they could do an impact assessment on the thousands of hectares of cucumbers which could be grown alongside the solar panels which are now in jeopardy thereby restroring these chancers' fortunes!
Obviously the position of the cucumbers would have to be carefully arranged so that their sunshine output did not interfere with the intermittent natural sunshine.
Surely a cucumber subsidy can be brought into play to offset the reduction in FiTs?
Trebles all round!
Subsidy farmers getting the shaft - delicious
Marginally off-topic - but wind farm owners must be spitting feathers again - wind down to 0.8% of demand and sinking - a nice anticyclone positioning itself over the British Isles....
Windy weather is just SOOOOO unpredictable - not that the DECC would admit it....