About that "Sustainable" Spanish Solar Power ...

It seems that the Spain.Gov was spending more on solar power subsidies than the total cost of energy production in the country:

"Sustainability" has been the magic word that extracted large sums of public subsidy that couldn't otherwise have been rationally justified using traditional cost/benefit measures. Spain paid 11 times more for "green" energy than it did for fossil fuels. The public makes up the difference.

But what, I hear you ask, about all those new "Green" jobs?

For sure, you can create a temporary jobs boom, but these are artificial, and the exercise is as useful as paying people to dig a hole in the ground, then fill it in. Spanish economist Professor Gabriel Calzada, at the University of Madrid estimated that each green job had cost the country $774,000.

Worse, a "green" job costs 2.2 jobs that might otherwise have been created - a figure Calzada derived by dividing the average subsidy per worker by the average productivity per worker. Industry, which can't afford to pay the higher fuel bills, simply moves elsewhere.

This is from a new analysis of the disaster that is the Spanish power program (PDF here). Remember, this is the program that was the model for Obama's renewable energy plan.

So what's the difference between the Spanish plan and Obama's? The Spain.Gov is ditching their's because it's bankrupting them. Obama's looks like it's coming at us. Good and hard.