Botched Spanish Solar Roofs
Yet another example of the havoc governments can cause by excessively interfering in the free market (with the best intentions of course).
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US targets China’s wind subsidy
Source:
Down To Earth blog
AFTER scuttling talks on transfer of technology in the recently concluded climate change conference in Cancun, the US now wants China to stop its clean energy programme. The US, on December 22, filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO) that China is unfairly helping its domestic wind power equipment manufacturing industry with soft loans, cheap land and subsidies, thereby giving it a competitive edge. This is despite the fact that the US has its own green energy development programmes which run into billion of dollars.
The United Steelworkers, North America’s largest industrial labour union, had filed a 5,800-page petition in September 2010, asking the Obama government to investigate whether China had broken any international trade regulations.
The US is targeting a Yuan 6.63 billion (one billion dollar) Chinese fund that aims to help domestic manufacturers build up their equipment inventory and substitute imports from other countries. Import substitution subsidies are prohibited under the WTO as they are harmful and “inherently trade distorting”, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said. “These subsidies operate as a barrier to US exports to China,” he added.
Special Report: Is a solar trade war about to flare?
By Matt Daily, Christoph Steitz and Leonora Walet, Eberswalde, Germany,
Reuters
Germany's fifth-biggest solar power park emerges as a smudge on the horizon long before you reach it on the outskirts of the small, sleepy village of Eberswalde, an hour's drive north of Berlin. "In the far distance, you can see it," Peter Kobbe says, pointing through heavy December snowfall as he steers his Citroen van along an icy road.
Kobbe, 64, works at Finow airport, where a local investment firm built the 58 million euro ($77 million) solar park in 2009. Finow itself was built by the Nazis before World War Two and later became one of the Soviet Union's main Cold War hubs. Now the small aircraft that still use the airport share it with about 90,000 solar modules -- which together generate enough to power 6,400 households a year.
"This is where they (the Soviets) used to store their nuclear weapons," says Kobbe, who runs a small museum documenting the airport's history, guiding his van over the snow-covered landing strip.
