European Renewable Subsidies Inadequate

Chinese over-production of solar panels in the international push for renewable energy has had its most damaging effect on European manufacturers, according to this Reuters article. Far down the list on government subsidies, they are closing plants in Europe and working on moving them to the US, where taxpayer money levels the playing field between the Chinese and the Yankees for now. There's a lamentation over the loss of jobs, jobs being an inevitable selling point in the energy transition story, but nowhere else. All businesses concentrate on employing the smallest number of people they can.

This curious circumstance, where fighting an existential threat is subordinated to financial considerations, creates another perspective on the renewable energy business. 

 

 

 greencitysolar.net

The reality is that the fossil fuel, or actually hydrocarbon, energy business is a developed one. Oil, coal and gas producers, refiners and distributors have been around for long enough to be able to work out the kinks in an industry that is at the center of the world economy. Through its history many of them have also failed and left the scene but the survivors are now entrenched and there will be few or none new competitors. It's unlikely that an entirely new competitor to Exxon will appear in the hydrocarbon marketplace.

"Renewable" energy, on the other hand, is open to different approaches to solving the problem of CO2 release into the atmosphere and arresting climate change, which has been occurring for the many millions of years of the earth's existence. While solar panels and wind turbines are capable of supplying energy on an intermittent basis and batteries may be developed to store some of that energy, it doesn't seem possible that their exclusive use is possible for a society that depends on reliable electricity. 

The biggest problem is an economic one. Integrating solar and wind energy into the existing power grids of the developed countries will be far more expensive than just solar panels and wind turbines. Although it's no longer a big number, the cost will be in the trillions of dollars, dollars provided by taxpayers and consumers, since that is the only source.

This amount of money isn't going to be used as fuel for boilers. It is going to be the income for corporations and their investors jumping into the unfamiliar territory of changing the world's energy structure. Just as with the development of the automobile over the last 120 years, many of these inexperienced newcomers will fail and disappear. Hudsons, Edsels, Studebakers and Packards, and hundreds of other marques, no longer roam the highways. However, these products were made and marketed by private, unsubsidized  companies. Their failure was felt by the owners and employees but not in any major way by the public at large.

The unholy alliance between academic research, government and crony capitalism is the impetus for government's intrusion into the energy field and the subsidies that fuel an expensive remedy for a problem that may not exist, the solving of which may well be more of an existential threat than that supposed problem.