Clean Energy Is Good, Exploiting It Isn’t

At the risk of stating the obvious, there have been huge mistakes made in governments’ promotion of renewables. But who should be surprised by that? Just because clean energy is a good thing doesn’t mean that there won’t be bad (greedy, corrupt) means taken to extract profit while screwing it up.

This article in The Economist gets at this central point, and concludes with some wisdom:

There is much that governments can do to encourage such progress in the future without repeating the mistakes of the past. … They should remove subsidies for technologies that compete with solar. … Above all they must fix a price of carbon that gives innovators the confidence that competing with fossil fuels for the long term will be a rewarding, and perhaps hugely profitable, undertaking. If politics prevent them from setting a substantial carbon price, they might consider requiring utilities to have a carbon-free component to their generating portfolios, as happens in many American states. But that needs to be open to all carbon-free technologies, not just the ones that the politicians like, so that the most efficient can prosper.