经贸专业英语报刊阅读教程 第一课 Good policy, a(4)

Europe has yet to devise a policy quite so disastrous, but Spain's solar subsidy comes a close second. Its feed-in tariff for solar energy, established in 2007, offered generators 44 euro cents per kilowatt-hour. Coal-fired power costs around 4 cents per kwh to generate. The tariff was supposed to be for small-scale projects, of 100kw or less; but generators found that they could get it for larger ones if they installed banks of 100kw modules next to each other.

The resulting boom benefited manufacturers not just in Spain but also in Germany and China, the biggest producers of solar cells. Last year Spain accounted for 40% of world demand. The government had planned for 400MW of solar capacity to be built by 2010. In the event, 3GW was built. Panicking about the commitments it was building up, the government announced that rates would drop to 32 cents on September 29th 2008. “There were all sorts of abuses,” says Jenny Chase, solar analyst at New Energy Finance. “If you connected a single module to the grid before September 29th, your whole project got financed. So modules were changing hands for vast sums of money.” After the deadline the market collapsed.

The Spanish crash hit silicon-wafer producers, the manufacturers of equipment for solar-cell producers and the makers of cells across the world. Prices across the industry crashed by 30-40%, and solar companies' share prices fell by 50-75% in 2008, though they have picked up a bit this year. Some 20,000 jobs have been lost in the solar industry in Spain over the past year, and plenty more elsewhere.

Europe's energy subsidies, unlike America's, do not include nuclear, largely because of German opposition (which may change, following Angela Merkel's recent election victory). Nuclear power is more expensive than coal and gas, but probably cheaper than most renewables—though nobody is sure, since political opposition has

ensured that few plants have been built in the West in recent years. Nuclear power does, however, have the virtue of scale. For renewables a gigawatt of power is a massive amount; for nuclear power it is the basic unit.

Thanks to stimulus money to combat the recession, subsidies are now flooding into the renewable-energy business faster than ever before. Governments across the world have trumpeted their stimulus packages as a way of saving the world

economy and the planet at the same time. Green stimulus money globally adds up to around $163 billion, according to New Energy Finance, of which more than $100 billion is being spent in America and China. The biggest chunk, around a quarter, is going on improving energy efficiency. Grid development is next, with a fifth.

The green stimulus money has been slow in coming. In America it started to flow in the second half of this year, just as the economy began to recover. Some of it has been used to extend the tax credits for wind and solar energy and to convert some of the tax-credit schemes into grants. As a result, wind developers in America now get a cheque for 30% of the cost of the project once they connect to the grid. That scheme runs out at the end of next year.