Van groene droom tot financiële nachtmerrie

Een groeiend aantal landen is van plan fors te snijden in de subsidiëring van duurzame energie. Spanje beet het spits af. Maar inmiddels hebben Frankrijk, Duitsland, Groot Brittannië, New South Wales (Australië) en de VS (Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Rhode Island en Virginia) het Spaanse voorbeeld gevolgd. Vele ondernemers die in zonne-energie en windmolens hadden geïnvesteerd, zien daarmee hun kapitaal verdampen. In het licht van deze maatregelen heeft ook de Deense windmolenproducent Vestas besloten de productie in te krimpen, waarbij 3000 banen verloren gaan, ofwel een zevende deel van het personeelsbestand. Ook andere windmolenproducenten zijn van plan soortgelijke maatregelen te nemen.

In de Canadese 'Financial Times' rapporteert Lawrence Solomon over de implosie van duurzame energieprojecten:

Across the world, unsustainable subsidies for wind and solar are being cut back. ...

On Friday, Spain slashed payouts for wind projects by 35% while denying support for solar thermal projects in their first year of operation. Spain’s renewables industry also faces a cap on the number of megawatt-hours eligible for subsidized rates. This latest round of Spanish cuts followed announcements in November that payouts for solar photovoltaic plants would be cut by 45%. Drastic as all these cuts seem — they will gut large parts of the renewables industry — they come as a relief to the industry, which had feared worse. In June, the Spanish government had threatened to renege on contracts it had entered into with the renewables industry, effectively bankrupting it.

Also Friday, France announced a four-month freeze on solar projects and a cap on the amount of solar that can be built, to nip a “veritable speculative bubble” by its rapacious renewables industry. These measures and others continue a retrenchment that saw industry payouts cut twice earlier this year, and that will likely continue as opposition grows to France’s rapidly rising power tax on electricity. Complains the French renewables industry, which predicts job losses amid the slew of projects that will disappear: “It’s a sad joke to change regulations every three months.”

Earlier this week, the German government announced it may discontinue the solar industry’s sweetheart tariffs in 2012. This latest announcement follows a surprise reduction in 2009 and another reduction to start in 2011. More is in the offing. In October, the German Energy Agency, the country’s official advisor on renewables, called for Germany’s drive toward solar to be “cut back quickly and drastically” by capping its installations of solar panels at a mere one gigawatt per year, down from the estimated eight to 10 GW being installed this year. Past cuts alone, it warned, would not avert the “catastrophe” of too much solar.

Also in October, New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, slashed by two-thirds the revenue that homeowners who had installed solar panels would receive, from 60¢ per kilowatt-hour to 20¢. The state’s solar manufacturers say this will put them out of business, and those out of state shudder that other Australian states will follow suit, effectively ending the country’s solar boom. New South Wales overnight went from being Australia’s most generous to least generous subsidizer.

Also in October, the U.K. government announced that withering spending cuts were coming to renewable projects, many of which have already been withering, and not just due to government austerity measures, or to the consumer backlash against rising power rates. Because of fierce grassroots opposition from the U.K.’s 230-odd anti-wind organizations, local governments have shelved or rejected two out of three wind-farm applications that have come before them. That ratio is likely to get worse for the wind industry, thanks to changes to planning laws that will be strengthening local councils at the expense of a national planning agency.

Lees verder hier.

Kortom de sector die door milieuactivisten van alle gezindten gedurende vele tientallen jaren is aangeprezen als een bron van toekomstige welvaart en groene hoogwaardige werkgelegenheid, blijkt niet in staat om de eigen broek op te houden en is bezig roemloos ten onder te gaan.

De groene droom heeft zich getransformeerd in een financiële nachtmerrie. Zonde van al het geld dat daar in is gepompt. Als men goed naar de kosten en baten had gekeken, was dat nooit gebeurd.