[MCN] The Economist: Renewable energy is not a "problem"

[Lance Olsen]

The Economist Feb 25th 2017

Clean energy's dirty secret:   Wind and solar 
power are disrupting electricity systems
But that's no reason for governments to stop supporting them

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21717371-thats-no-reason-governments-stop-supporting-them-wind-and-solar-power-are-disrupting

Some key quotes:

"It is no longer far-fetched to think that the 
world is entering an era of clean, unlimited and 
cheap power.  About time, too."

"Yet green energy has a dirty secret. The more it 
is deployed, the more it lowers the price of 
power from any source."

"Places with an abundance of wind, such as China, 
are curtailing wind farms to keep coal plants in 
business."

"Policymakers are already seeing this 
inconvenient truth as a reason to put the brakes 
on renewable energy. In parts of Europe and 
China, investment in renewables is slowing as 
subsidies are cut back. However, the solution is 
not less wind and solar. It is to rethink how the 
world prices clean energy in order to make better 
use of it."

Closing sentence: " In short, policymakers should 
be clear they have a problem and that the cause 
is not renewable energy, but the out-of-date 
system of electricity pricing. Then they should 
fix it."
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"Proponents of the loan push notion suggest that 
the banks have victimized themselves by their 
absurd lending decisions ....  From this 
perspective, bankers as loan pushers become 
active door to door salesmen (albeit in pin 
stripe suits)."

William Darity and Bobbie Horn. The Loan Pushers: 
The role of commercial banks in the international 
debt crisis. 1988. Ballinger Publishing Company, 
a subsidiary of Harper & Row.
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"In the early 1990s Š. Tommy Mullaney, eleven, of 
Crownsville, Maryland, returned home from camp in 
the summer of 1990 to find his name inscribed on 
a MasterCard complete with a $5,000 credit line. 
' I jumped up and down and said Wow - the 
hologram was cool,'  Tommy told the Washington 
Post. 'But it sure made me wonder who was running 
that bank'."

James Grant. Pp. 436-437, "Afterword: End of the 
Line," Money of the Mind: Borrowing and Lending 
in America from the Civil War to Micheal Milken.