Thursday 26 March 2009

green energy plans in disarray as wind farm giant slashes investment

timesonline

“Britain’s ambition to become a global leader in renewable energy suffered a major setback…“.
because Iberdrola Renewables Inc., Portland, Oregon, reduces its investment in Britain by 40% or £300 Million. 60% or £450 Million remain dedicated for the time being.


Iberdrola Renewables Inc. is owned by the Spanish Iberdrola SA which owns Scottish Power.

To put this into its global context, which any global leader, more so a would-be leader ought to be doing:

• Britain’s aim is estimated to cost £100 Billion.
• That aim is to boost renewables to produce 35% of all electricity
• … and to make Britain a “global leader”.
• The time target is 2020,
• 11 years from now.
• We are now at a level of approximately 5%.

At the same time we face …

• a collapsing finance and banking system,
• …with economies around the world shrinking by two digit numbers.
• Governments competing in throwing (book-) money at insolvent banks,
• …and in inventing one economic stimulus package after the other.
• All of the above is inflating lending and spending by approximately one trillion!

What is more, we are living towards
• a climate crisis,
• a food crisis,
• a water crisis,
• a population crisis,

while every economy’s share of the global volume of labour is shrinking more and more and with time running out.

Is that not enough to finally start doing our homework? Should we not at long last understand that we keep trying to solve our problems by merely using the same methodologies which originally created the problems?

The conglomerate of unregulated banks with unknown lending, spending and gambling levels got us into this; we are trying to answer this by lending and spending to the very same? How fruitful can that be?

The oligopoly of a handful or two of energy giants shall obviously bail us out of the climate crisis; make Britain a “global leader”. But it forces us even deeper into dependency from these giants that trick us into high gas prices and block progress in building up intelligent grid(s).

Instead of setting targets and goals that are not worth the paper they are printed on and instead of building up more and more dependency on always the same circles, to avoid a (sub-posh) Italian term, we should rather invest all our capacities and means into intelligent ways of using less power, decentralising the generation of power and boosting efficiency?

It will be a much more stabilising approach to animate and support millions of households and companies to do just that!

It will make sense to help millions with relatively small sums each which add up to not even near as much as is thrown into the black, unknown depths of the banks’ black holes?

To take these thoughts to the extreme: why not bail out private enterprise and individuals, abate their debts by repaying those to the respective banks? An estimated one Trillion would give banks their lent amounts back, purchase power would be reinstalled, innovation and entrepreneurship driven fast forward and the finance system back to normal.

Normal? Well, the fallout would be that such banks whose gambling departments had overexcited the game would either have to find new investors or - go bust. New banks would shoot up everywhere based on the original bank business model; they would need regulation; the real one this time just like any other industry gets.

To say it with a legal term: it would be nothing else than “reversing the onus of proof” and everybody would know where he or she, the fellow man and bank stood.

At the same time this “economic injection” would allow government(s) to implement a whole set of wise rules of how to target issues such as energy efficiency; a couple of thousand observing cameras less but bringing in skilled but independent energy advisors will make a huge difference to the population’s handling and understanding of these issues.

Thereafter being a global leader must be fun compared to leading the globe into more disasters.

It goes round in circles, they say.

Carpe diem.


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