Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The answer is blowing in the wind - it really is

Someone had to go cheesy and quote Bob Dylan on the answer to the prayers of many small German towns.

This country roughly the size of Montana lacks the abundance of natural resources of said U.S. state and the ugliness of Butte with its stripped away mountain sides.

The answer to the money woes of towns around here is blowing in the wind coming over the hills. Captured by huge wind mills - the new generation is higher that the tallest cathedrals - the wind becomes electricity and the mill owners send some of the generated money into the town coffers.

Out here in the country side where the population has been shrinking for a good decade and will continue to decline, higher local taxes could not stem the budget shortfalls but the wind can.

A range of hill tops a few miles from us offered the standard German romantic forest view until just two years ago.

Last week, we counted eleven operating huge wind mills and growing concrete stumps for another three.

One jubilant town council published revenues from ten wind mills of over 400 000 dollars per year. 

The uplifting power of the wind is no longer reserved for pilots and hot air balloons!

The big smiles of the local town treasurers are wind powered, with the smiles projected to continue for twenty years for each mill.

Faded old blueprints for fixing ailing town infrastructure are pulled out of the storage bins, get computerized and sent out to local construction firms.

Does this sound too good to be true?

Well, the citizens of country have been paying a "green fee" of currently about 8 cents per kilowatt/hour on top of their electricity bills. The fee subsidizes renewables alternative energy and has pushed the end user price to just under 30 Euro cents (almost 40 US) for residental users.

If we take the number of residents of the example town and the estimated cost of the green fee and subtract them from the windfall, the 400 K looks a lot more like 200 K.

Someone always pays. 

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