the Solar boom and bust!

                        Recently the BBC reported about a body called REN21 with a headline "Renewable energy surge reaches record levels"   The green advocates in the BBC see solar and wind as the future. As Christopher Booker has pointed out what the BBC did not tell readers is that REN21 is the world`s leading lobby group for "green" energy. What they omit of course is that in the case of solar panels their output averages no more than 15 percent of their capacity.  As Booker points out no-one would think of building a solar farm without massive subsidies.   The reality is that the BP Energy Review shows that solar power provides less than 1 percent of the world`s electricity and barely 0.3 percent of all its energy.  Despite all the billions poured into the "solar boom" the startling feature is the regularity with which the companies investing in it go bust.

          The continuing financial  collapse of solar farms.
                   One of the first in 2011 despite being given more than half a billion dollars by President Obama was a US firm Solyndra.  This was followed in 2013 by the collapse of Solar Trust of America, given a $2.1 billion loan guarantee by the Obama administration to build the largest solar farm in the world in California.  Last March the collapse of Europe`s largest solar company Abengoa after building two billion dollar solar farms in the US was the biggest bankruptcy in Spanish history.  Another giant US firm Sun Edison last year valued at $10 billion has seen its shares fall from $33.44 last July to barely a cent. Among those enraged by Sun Edison`s bankruptcy has been the residents of several Wiltshire villages who only agreed to the US firm covering 56 acres of their countryside in blue panels because their communities were promised £40 000 of which they will now never see a penny!  
                (summary of a report by Christopher Booker in the Daily Telegraph)