A tax on sunshine…
The Spanish government’s decision to impose a tax on sunshine, explicitly designed to prevent households and businesses from generating electricity from solar panels, illustrates all too graphically this administration’s commitment to protecting the country’s electricity utilities, which in turn have become retirement homes for politicians of all stripes.
This law is a clear example of prevarication, defined by legal dictionaries as: “The acting with unfaithfulness and want of probity. The term is applied principally to the act of concealing a crime.” At the same time as civilized countries are doing all they can to incentivize the residential creation of solar power to feed into the national grid — often through tax breaks and subsidies — Spain, one of the countries best positioned to do so, is doing everything it can to prevent people from doing so. But elsewhere in the world, encouraged by Swanson’s Law, solar energy is the great white hope for clean, cheap, renewable energy.
Decentralizing generation is a global trend, and solar panels now sit atop houses and apartment blocks throughout the world… except in Spain, where a corrupt government is doing all it can to prevent this happening.
The Spanish government’s new law is both inexplicable and arbitrary, but leaves no wriggle room: every aspect is covered. To begin with, there’s a tax on generation. Then…
