Taxing the sun?. Yes, in Spain this seems to be possible.

Absolutely ashamed by my government’s insane policies on this regards, Spain is now (…) attempting to scale back the use of solar panels – the use of which they have encouraged and subsidized over the last decade – by imposing a tax on those who use the panels. The intention is clearly to scare taxpayers into connecting to the grid in order to be taxed. The tax, however, will make it economically unfeasible for residents to produce their own energy: it will be cheaper to keep buying energy from current providers. And that is exactly the point. (…)

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/08/19/out-of-ideas-and-in-debt-spain-sets-sights-on-taxing-the-sun/

While we see anywhere else in the world this is being encouraged we don’t, we do exactly the opposite… but if you wonder why this could happen in a allegedly developed country like mine i herewith let you know the reason why… not to compete with other energies or more exactly other big companies providing that energy. A shame or even more than that, a fu***** shame.

So you encourage sustainability and now you discourage it?. In a country like Spain with such an incredible unemployment rate, which slowly reduces this figures at the expense of lower wages, winning competitiveness but losing anywhere else!!! (Mostly if we have cities with +3000 hours of sunshine a year!)

Anyway, trying not to get too upset after writing this words and also trying to make this makes sense in a GIS blog i will try to show you how Lon Angeles county in the US is encouraging the installation of solar panels, ranking all 2010 parcels according to wattHours per square meter. Isn’t it a politically and technically state of the art approach? Yes in my opinion it is, indeed.

http://egis3.lacounty.gov/dataportal/2015/04/07/solar-data-summarized-to-2010-parcels/

Important Note.  The shapefile includes 4 fields that are summaries of the solar potential:

1. Rank 1 – Square feet of roof receiving excellent solar input (> 1.4 million wattHours per square meter)
2. Rank 2 – square feet of roof receiving good solar input (1.15 – 1.4 million wH/meter squared)
3. Rank 3 – square feet of roof receiving poor solar input (950,000 – 1.15 million wH/meter squared)
4. Rank 4 – square feet of roof receiving negligible solar input (< 950,000 million wH/meter squared)

Hope you like this post, if so, share it.

Kind Regards,

Alberto C.L.
MSc GIS and worried about “government insanity”.