Solar powered spending

It’s not often this blog delves into politics and economics as, being lower middle class, this writer lacks the intellect to take on the big issues of the day. Well, that’s what the establishment brought me up to believe anyway.

Anywho, as I strolled through the centre of Reading today, a familiar scenario greeted me in the middle of the pedestrianised Broad Street; the sight of people whose job it is to convert your faith or sell you something.

After being accosted by a man who wanted to save my soul and a woman who wanted to sell me being shot in the testicles for an afternoon aka paintballing (incidentally, I’d choose the latter as a lifetime of commitment seems hard work), another salesman, who didn’t stop to talk to me, caught my eye.

He was at a stall that said “No more energy bills after one easy payment” which was empty, completely unsurprisingly, as nothing is ever that simple. Even the general public, who I’ve often spotted picking up pennies off of the wet pavement, weren’t gullible enough to believe this money-saving ruse.

However, it got me thinking; could solar energy help boost the UK’s flagging economy?

Here is my basic, layman analysis using back of a fag packet maths and a particularly loose grip of the laws of economics.

The reason for the fragility of the UK economy is a lack of faith in the system and not enough disposable income for the Average Joe to spend on things like speedboats, new shoes and fancy chocolates leading to less jobs in industries like designing, making and selling speedboats, shoes and fancy chocolates leading to less disposable income for the people who would fill these roles and so on in a long, unbroken cycle.

Now, if you can free up more of a person’s income to allow them to spend it on the above capitalist items of aspiration, that will help the economy grow by producing more jobs and then more disposable income from the newly employed.

So, if the Government was to invest in a scheme whereby, gradually, all the homes in the UK are fitted with the capacity to produce its own electricity through solar power, this would reduce a household’s energy bills leaving them more cash to spend on Thornton’s chocolate.

Naturally, the outlay for such a project wouldn’t come cheap and it is estimated that it will take until 2020 for the PV format of producing solar power to become competitive with fossil fuel alternatives but even starting a long-term scheme by just specifying all new properties must have solar panels built into them would be a foundation on which to build.

Likewise, funding a project for all homes to be fitted with proper insulation to the reduce energy bills for certain households and allow for more disposable income. Little things like this make a difference.

That said, the £3.2 billion the Treasury is expected to make by 2016 from carbon taxes (the costs of which electricity companies are allowed to pass on to their customers) is kind of a rather large weight to lose should a solar power policy be pursued.