Strangled at birth

Rather unwittingly the last spendthrift Labour government thew the middle classes a nice little bone in their bid to be all green and cuddly. This was something called the Feed In Tarrif (FIT) which basically meant that if you generated your own electricity from a solar photovoltaic array on your roof you would get paid to do so and at a very generous rate of 43p per kWh as well. That's guaranteed for 25 years and index linked.

Oh and as there's no way to actually measure how much you generate gets back into the grid, you get 3p per 0.5kWh on top of that.

And you get to use all the electricity you generate too, so a household bill like mine of around £800 a year would come down to around £200 a year.

So with a 4kW array costing around £14k to install it works out that over the 25 years you'll make around 10 to 12% return and break even around the 8 year mark. And with my current investments making 2 or 3% at best its an absolute no-brainer. So last month some men crawled over my roof and I now have my own little power station that's  generated over 100kWh of nice clean energy and enriched me to the best part of fifty quid in the couple of weeks its been running.

What's that Mr Government? Middle class people with disposable income making a profit? Oh no, that will never do, never never never! You're there Mr Middleclass to pay your taxes that we will spend on services you'll never use and give your money away to those poor developing nations with space programmes and nuclear weapons like India and China. We can't have you doing that, you're supposed to be installing solar because you can afford it and to make us in government look all green and answer the problem of Warble Gloaming! You're not actually supposed to treat this as an investment!

So in six weeks time the coalition are going to cut the FIT to 22p, and that's only if you've got a "C" energy rated house already (which is nigh on impossible to get if your house is more than 20 years old) . I did a quick back on an Excel spreadsheet calculation and the ROI on a 4kW rig like mine drops to around 2% and the payoff period almost triples to 21 years.

Now a small but significant industry has grown up in this country over the last 2 years to service the demand for Solar PV; it's estimated that it employs around 25,000 people. This is not to mention the ancillary services it supports like the team of scaffolders who shoved a load of metal poles round my house (and then took 2 weeks to come and take them down again!) - I was chatting to Mr Scaffolder and he said solar PV was around half their work these days.

Well Mr Scaffold is probably going to have to lay off some of his staff and there's going to be 25000 people heading for the dole office come December because nobody is going to want Solar PV now. A new industry, supporting thousands of people has been strangled at birth because oh my god we can't have people making money out of Eco-Wibble can we. Those people on the social are going to cost way fecking more than the feed in tarrif money ever would.

Sure, the high rate was to kick start the solar business in the UK and it was unsustainable at 43p but why the hell didn't you cut it back slowly and on the dates you promised? All the hoons in Whitehall have done by cutting the FIT in half is to strangle one of the very private enterprises that was supposed to hoover up all these public sector jobs at birth.

Fucking idiots.

Wick

So it turns out that due to a massive geographical error by me who thought that Caithness was somewhere to the west of Glasgow I now find that I have to go to a wedding in Wick, the most northerly town in mainland UK.

Bum.

Oh well start to have a look around at the best way to get there. Driving is out as I don't have enough time and it's a 1200+ mile round trip and a look at our crappy railways shows that it will take the best part of fourteen hours to get from where I live in Norfolk to Wick and cost the best part of 130 quid so long as I get the cheapie fares. So that leaves flying.

Ah but that makes me an irresponsible planet destroying dragon doesn't it. Taking all those budget flights and even more so taking an internal flight. Bad dragon, naughty dragon, Dave the Cameroon wants you to pay lots of tax for being such a selfish dragon and not thinking about your carbon pawprint.

Dave, just stand there whilst I breathe on you, you useless cunt. Oh and Gordon, if you could stand your ugly, blubbery, dour presbetarian arse next to him, there's a good chap.

Look I'm not a "climate change denier", it would appear from the evidence that on balance of probabilities anthropogenic carbon is having an effect on global temperatures. But taxing the wings off my back because I have to fly to fucking Wick isn't going to make any difference whatsoever. I need to go, flying is the only option so now I have to pay you cunts more money for the privilege. And what the fuck in this unilateral "we will cut carbon by blahblahblah percent" shite you've all been coming out with. Look tossers we are a pimple on the arse of the world when it comes to carbon emissions; all you'll do is pauper the country whilst the likes of China and India do bog all about it and grow their economies. Sure you can stand up in international meetings and go "Now you should all be good boys and girls and we can lecture you now because we've done it" and said nations will go "Yeah, sure, fuck off but thanks for all those jobs and industries that you let us have" and it will give you a nice warm fuzzy feeling right up until the point where you get back to the UK and are flayed alive with low-emission chainsaws by the angry jobless, penniless mob whose houses have all flooded because you spent all the flood defence money on helping Shitholestan install wind turbines and solar panels.

And this is now all three parties trying to "outgreen" each other by the brute instrument of taxing people (well, middle class people who have the money to pay taxes at any rate) to change their behaviour. Guess it's a vote for "None Of You Cunts" scrawled over the ballot paper come election time.