The Solar Story "Mess"

Over the last day or two....if you've been watching German news.....the solar energy story keeps coming up.

Here is the simple story.....the current government in charge (the CDU/CSU and FDP folks)....have put up this talking point idea (it's not approved yet)....to cut solar power subsides by approximately thirty-percent.  Naturally, some folks are very upset by these government subsides disappearing.

Based on comments in the Local....if you have solar panels up and supply juice to the grid....you would under the new plan.....get around 13.5 Euro cents to 19.5 Euro cents for a kilowatt hour.  All of this would be dependent on the time of day and seasonal variables of course.

So you get around to this whole subsidy thing and why the government guys might be right about changing the game.  The subsidy bucket of money amounts to 12 billion Euro.  With the amount of growth in the solar business....it is possible that maybe half of the bucket (6 billion Euro).....might be taken up by the solar subsidy episode.

The truth is that the 12 billion Euro were supposed to be for all renewable energy....not just for solar business.  So you come to this reality.....only three percent of the grid power....starts out from solar energy.  Yet, you end up with almost half the bucket of subsidy money going to a pretty small chunk of the entire power grid.

You'd think about this for a while and eventually come to this idea that help other renewable sources of power might be the better way to continue using the taxpayer's money.

A number of odd comments came out of the opposition discussion.  One Greeenpeace guy wanted everyone to know that ten thousand medium-sized companies were threatened and there might be well over 100k jobs lost in Germany.  I went looking for an explanation of these statistics, but no one in the media challenged the guy or laid out details of how 10k medium-sized companies were involved in this entire solar empire.

There are some odd factors to renewable energy which I came to realize in my time in Europe.  First, if you want to use windmills.....you need to be in regions that have a continual wind presence for the majority of the year.  If you only have 150 days of decent wind....your return on the windmill energy investment won't be worth anything.  In the US....you have three general regions where wind energy would pay off...both coasts, and a general path from Canada down toward Texas.  If you put up a windmill operation in Alabama or Ohio.....it'd still turn, but the amount of turn created wouldn't be at the same rate as one of these in Kansas or north Texas.

Another observation is that solar energy can be collected in every single location on the face of the Earth.  However, if you live in an area that is continually cloudy.....your return on your investment will not be the same as a solar operation in Tucson, Arizona.  Compare the Tucson investment against one in Bavaria.....and you'd notice that Bavaria just won't make the same amount of money as Tucson.

I'd humbly challenge the 100k jobs lost comment here, and the various other comments by the wide array of opposition folks.  The bucket of money ought to be wisely spent.  Just saying things need to continue on......as is.....probably isn't going to be the wisest idea.