Getting a share of the neighbor's wind farm profits

Now, that's what I call "the sharing economy". Unlike all the crap PR out of the Valley of the Silicon Kings and Silicone Queens, being given a share of the income from a neighboring wind farm is true sharing at its best, don't you think?

To free marketeers around the world, such a policy may sound like a socialist nightmare come true.

So, if such a policy exists, its must surely be Venezuela, or Cuba, right? Or maybe little landlocked Bolivia, where increased license revenues from extraction of natural resources have actually been making a difference to the lives of the indigenous poor?

Surprise, it is Germany.

Yes, the European industrial powerhouse which only instituted a loophole-riddled minimum wage four (4) days ago, is quietly doling out money from wind turbines to people whose only qualification is that they live in the vicinity of the wheelies.

Before you sell off your German holdings and take them to Saudi Arabia - not the name sake of the famous Arrabbiata sauce despite religious policies that would deserve the name - or to Singapore, the world's nicest democratic non-democracy, let's look at the facts.

It turns out that the Money For Nothing scheme is limited mostly to communities in diire straits. You 're welcome.

County or state zoning of inland wind farms caused some towns to be excluded from the windfalls due to their location in or adjacent to protected areas. In out neck of the woods, this affects small towns along a national park. Their immediate neighbors to the north of the freeway that represents the line of demarcation can build as many turbines as they want. For the sake of neighborly relations and as a token of political understanding, the disadvantaged towns get a small percentage of the revenue.

See, this is not so bad. It's not as if the entrepreneurial individual builds something and it then forced to give the lazy bum individual neighbor some of the income.

Late last year, though, there was a headline that sounded differently regrading the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The headlines mostly said something along the line Neighbors to be given share of wind farms or Neighbors to profit from wind park revenues.

Always alert to anything that smacks of Money for Nothing, we checked.  As it turned out, companies planning wind farms in the state may be required to offer up to 20% of shares in the farm to neighbor investors. So, the neighbors still have to put in money, and if the company and the neighbors agree on a voluntary arrangement, the voluntary arrangement has precedence over the legal stipulations even if the total share percentage is under 20%.

Both of these measures sound more like common sense to us than like socialists raping  entrepreneurs. 

In our roaming in that urbanized landscape that Germans still sweetly call nature, we have seen some small villages with wind farms only a few hundred yards from the nearest homes, and we can tell you these big machines, higher than most cathedrals, do make a lot of noise. The people living close to them don't get any money, despite living next to the rural equivalent to an inner city freeway.

We hope the folks of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern get their opt in law, and we are sure the noise is made more bearable by the monthly bank statement.