For those who missed it, here's my offering to BBC Radio Cornwall's breakfast programme this morning - a report on how solar power developers are touring the Cornish countryside, seeking south-facing fields and offering to line the pockets of farmers and other landowners who like the idea of watching the sun shine and their bank accounts expand.
I've been interested in renewable energy most of my adult life - a schoolboy enthusiasm for engineering put me among the early supporters of the Centre for Alternative Technology in the 1970s and Ive had a passive solar collector, for hot water, on the roof of my house for nearly 20 years. These days almost everyone agrees that we need a mixed basket of energy sources, including renewables, and that most of all we should try to use less energy in the first place. What in 1974 was far-out hippy nonsense has become mainstream government policy.
I have to confess, however, that I am unable to dispute the logic which underpins George Monbiot's critique of the way the solar power feed-in tariffs simply transfer wealth from the taxpayer to those private individuals fortunate enough to own a bit of spare land. £75,000 a year just for renting out a field? If it was happening under the aegis of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy the Daily Mail would be denouncing it as completely bonkers. Where is the Taxpayers' Alliance when you need them?
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