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Solar Energy in Economic And Personal Finance Aspects

By Lucas Burris


Most of the time when people are interested in solar energy, it is either because they are looking for an investment opportunity, or it is because of environmental concerns that they have. While we will be going to through the personal financial aspect, this article is going to take a different tack and look at the economic effects.

Personal Financial Aspect

Three main considerations have to be taken in to account when looking at the personal financial aspect. You have the cost of a solar installation to think about. Then you have the savings that you can make by using this "free" energy. You also have the feed in tariff to consider, which can make you money.

So first of all we'll look at the costs. They're not insubstantial, as a normal solar installation can cost anywhere from 8000 to 12000. So you really have to think about it as an investment. You don't necessarily have to have the money directly though, you can also get a loan or have the cost put on top of your mortgage.

It's a relatively large investment, so is it worth it? If you are only considering the savings on their own, then the answer will probably will be no. If you have deep environmental concerns though, then even the fact that it will probably take 25 years to pay back the costs in this way along might not put you off.

There's another way that you can make money now though, and that's with the feed in tariff. This is a scheme which pays you for all of the solar energy that you produce, whether you use it or not. This cuts the time that it will take to pay off the installation costs by more than half. This does make it a good investment.

The Economy

It is because of the danger of global warming that the government introduced the feed in tariff, so not having to do with the economy at all. And of course the more that we get energy from clean sources, the less we need from polluting fossil fuels so this much is quite well through through.

They also often say, however, that it is going to be good for the economy. That's because it will create jobs for people making and installing solar panels. That is also true, as far as it goes. That is to say that it will be good for the green economy. However it is not going to be good for the economy as a whole.

The reason that we can say that this won't be good for the wider economy is that when the government spends money, it is because it is taking money from other people, they don't create anything to get that money. So this is money which would have been spent and invested in one way or another, but when people and businesses do it they do it for what they want. When the government does it, it does it in a way that people would not choose to.

Of course there may be occasions that the government spends money in precisely the same way that the people they have taken the money from would have. And to exactly that extent, they are superfluous. They may as well not be there.

This brings us to the crux of why the economy will not be improved and will instead suffer. People spend their own money to improve their standard of living, so when another entity spends their money it is not necessarily going to improve this standard of living. Having said that though, it has to be considered that the importance of renewable energy might be great enough that it is worth this contraction in the economy.




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