Sunday, October 20, 2013

I don't get it

The politicians keep telling us how expensive it will be to combat climate change. I just don't quite understand why.

You can have a set of solar panels installed on your roof and they will pay for themselves in five years time. After that you are getting free, clean energy. If that can be achieved on a small scale surely it could be done on a much, much bigger scale, even cheaper.

Looking at the websites domestic solar installations cost from $2500. Obviously it wouldn't cost as much when you aren't paying retail price for panels. Installing them in a field would also no doubt be easier than having people climb up on a whole lot of roofs and hook each system individually up to the grid.

If it costs about $1000 for panels that would cover one person's energy use, then we can have the whole country going green for a grand sum of $23 billion.

That may seem like a lot of money, but the government can borrow that pretty damn cheaply. Currently the government is issuing bonds at 2.25% which means the interest bill would be a piddly $450 million p.a. Just like the domestic systems they should also be able to pay for themselves over 5 years.

So why do we have some dumb direct action policy that doesn't actually seem to be taking any action?

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