Det er blevet sagt om socialisme at det kun virker indtil man løber tør for andre folks penge. Bæredygtig energi kan tilsyneladende også kun bære indtil man løber tør for andre folks penge. Fra The Register

Dead broke Spain can’t afford to prop up renewables anymore. The Spanish government is cutting the numbers of hours in a day it’s prepared to pay for “clean” energy.

Estimates put the investment in solar energy in Spain at €18bn - but the investment was predicated, as it is with all flakey renewables, on taxpayer subsidies. With the country’s finances in ruins, making sacrifices for the Earth Goddess Gaia is an option Spain can no longer afford. Incredibly, Spain pays more in subsidies for renewables than the total cost of energy production for the country. It leaves industry with bills 17 per cent higher than the EU average.

“We feel cheated”, Tomas Diaz of the Spanish Photovoltaic Industry Association told Bloomberg. But it’s undoubtedly taxpayers who have been cheated the most.

Venstrefløjen har en ide om at ingen opdager sammenhængen blot man spreder den ud på så mange som muligt. Artiklen henviser til en efterhånden berømt undersøgelse af det spanske alternativ energi eksempel fra hvilken det bl.a. hedder

2. Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data1, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence,
by two different methods, that the U.S. should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs
on average, or about 9 jobs lost for every 4 created, to which we have to add
those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would
have created.

(…)

5. Despite its hyper-aggressive (expensive and extensive) “green jobs” policies it
appears that Spain likely has created a surprisingly low number of jobs, two-
thirds of which came in construction, fabrication and installation, one quarter in
administrative positions, marketing and projects engineering, and just one out
of ten jobs has been created at the more permanent level of actual operation
and maintenance of the renewable sources of electricity.

6. This came at great financial cost as well as cost in terms of jobs destroyed
elsewhere in the economy.

7. The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 to create each
“green job”, including subsidies of more than €1 million per wind industry job.

8. The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the
destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs
destroyed for every “green job” created.

Ja hvem skulle have troet at økonomien ville tage skade af produktionstab, som følge af ineffektivitet?