Dakota Beacon

Put on your best acting face.

Imagine running a power company. You charge your customers $100 per megawatt-hour of electricity. One day, government officials show up at your office to force you to pay ten times this rate--$1000 per megawatt-hour--for excess power that these same government officials force you to buy from homeowners with solar arrays which generate more power than the homeowners use.

How do you recoup your losses?

Why, you charge customers who don't have solar arrays higher rates to cover the cost of paying off every mom-and-pop producer of solar power.

Here comes the acting part.

When applications for installing rooftop arrays top 3,000 a day, you go into convulsions and express utter shock.

Ah, only in France.

French lawmaker Francois-Michel Gonnog acted stunned. "We didn’t see it coming. What is in the pipeline this year is unimaginable. Farmers were being told they could put panels on hangars and get rid of their cows."

Carl Shockley reports,

Now costing 1 billion euros per year, the program does not expire until 2017 and has put the utility in trouble. EDF’s [Electricitie de France] stock declined 20 percent last year, compared to only a 3.7 percent decline for the rest of Europe’s Stoxx 600 Utilities Index. The utility is now 57 billion euros in debt. Plans to upgrade its aging fleet of 53 nuclear reactors — which provide 75 percent of France’s electricity — have been thrown into doubt. The utility has been forced to raise the renewables levy on other customers from 4.50 euros to 7.50 euros per megawatt-hour, but financial analysts say they will have to pay up to 12.90 euros — almost 25 percent above the market price — for EDF to break even.

And here's the juicy part. Another French official, Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, revealed that a majority of the solar panels installed in France have "a highly questionable carbon footprint." In other words, the manufacture, transport, and operation of the arrays actually result in the release of more "greenhouse gasses" than the emission reductions allegedly realized as a result of the solar power users not drawing from the conventional power grid. We can imagine how aghast CO₂-fearing global warming alarmists must be.

So then, in the ditzy liberal quest for a "renewable future," the ditzy French government pulled a typically ditzy liberal stunt: reduce your carbon footprint by increasing your carbon footprint.

There go those darned unintended consequences again. You know, the ones that come from ditzy liberal panaceas?

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© 2011 Chuck Rogér