Today’s Energy Robber Barons
How a Renewables-based Grid has Created a New Generation of Green Capitalist Exploitation
The main profits from any energy revolution are made by the first movers. With the present transition to green, renewable energy, the profits are obscene.
In 2017, I installed a number of solar panels on my roof. I wrote about how I realized what a hypocrite I was, erecting environmentally destructive green vanity symbols while financially impairing my neighbors. For the last decade, I enjoyed subsidies and free energy while they had to pay for them with higher electricity tariffs. To this day, solar panels are still playthings for the privileged, but it has gotten worse. As the green activists continue to push for a renewable-only grid, I am finding new ways to profit from my neighbors. As in 2017, I still hate myself … but I’m not an idiot. I’ll bank the profits and the government incentives.
Greens and socialists (more and more the same thing today – Marxists without the proletariat), have this anti-industry, post-capitalist agenda where they see renewables as the means to return energy to the people, the prosumers, flattening the inequities and social injustices of capitalist exploitation. These people are so cute, and while on paper, it might sound virtuous, in practice, the consequences, especially to their electorate, are devastating. How many apartment complexes or working class neighborhoods have solar panels or wind farms on their properties? Certainly not the apartment building across the street from me. The only thing they are getting is unaffordable energy bills, unstable electricity supply and a grim outlook as the energy mix continues to decarbonize.
Capitalism is merely entrepreneurial opportunism. It is not a disease that some self-appointed socialists need to eradicate; it is human nature. Even in the strictest peasant Communist state, people will still try to take advantage of an opportunity and do better for themselves and their families. Striving for success is normal behavior. The socialists find their progress or success offensive; the greens detest their increased consumption and wealth.
To them, the fossil fuel industry symbolizes this expansion of wealth, environmental harm and naked exploitation. So they have been running a campaign to transition from these capitalist weapons of mass destruction, and despite the temporary Trump bump, have been fairly successful in shifting from an efficient energy grid mix to a green grid. Meanwhile the dash for Middle East oil and the war economy market panic are masking the movement towards a renewables-based market trading environment. But behind to political gyrations, the transition continues unabated. If anything, their argument goes, the fossil fuel supply cuts have made a transition to renewables even more urgent. With that newfound urgency, we seem to be entering a new age of “green capitalism” on the renewables market.
What has changed in those nine years since I decided to put those horrible green goblins on my roof?
Grid Evolutions
People with means are able to capitalize on the opportunities in the energy sector. Wealthy neighborhoods have solar panels, EV chargers and well-insulated homes, all subsidized by the governments pretending they were meeting UN climate targets (by incentivizing the affluent). Farmers are now planting solar farms instead of food, leasing space for wind turbines and generating methane instead of fertilizer. I fear for the long-term effects of this incentivized stupidity, but at least these farmers are finally earning a decent income and having some time off in the summer.
In the decade since my solar panels have been paying me dividends, we have seen several energy shocks (from the post-COVID supply crisis to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the present tragedy in Iran). While my socialist-green neighbors have had to pay premiums to keep the lights on, I continued to enjoy free electricity and heating.
Faced with the climate-imposed demands for an energy transition, and the green NGO rejection of nuclear, cold fusion, hydroelectric and geothermal solutions, utilities have had to find means to control the unpredictability of renewable energy supply. To be more efficient, they are letting the market take over. The main threat is to have mass outages caused by renewable energy instability (remember the Spanish-Portuguese grid failure last year). Amid stupid, irrational preconditions, the grid had to get smart.
Most energy companies are demanding their customers install digital electricity meters so they can more easily inflict variable pricing to control and reduce energy consumption during peak periods. Seeing how this change would mean my old analog meter would no longer spin backwards to provide me with free energy and heating through the dark winters, I did what most other affluent Belgians did – I went out and bought a home battery so I could avoid having to pay for electricity at night. With government incentives, I didn’t even realize I was no longer going to be sharing my energy with my neighbors.
As I watched them install this non-recyclable, heavy-metaled monster in my garage, I tried not to think of all the children in the Congo that were being exploited for my privilege. And of course, all of my options are “Made in China”. There is no way this green solution of home batteries could ever be considered as ecologically friendly, let alone socially just. But the Green-Socialists have willed it so and the UN has sanctioned it as a necessary step for Net Zero. I made the investment.
Buy Low, Sell High
But I didn’t just buy a home battery. I bought a smart battery. As the salesman was trying to convince me of my advantages, even I was floored by the obscenity of this next level of green capitalist opportunism.
With my smart battery on a dynamic pricing electricity contract, I could turn my solar panels into a money spinner, and more. There are times when energy on the grid is at a surplus (ie, on very sunny or windy days) causing electricity to be negatively priced. At this time I could top up my smart battery and wait until the grid price is high to sell my power back at a profit. This is not energy I produced to share on the grid, this is pure, no-risk market manipulation automated to ensure maximum profit. My salesman was from a new energy provider that only serves such clients and then trades their surplus on the open market, furthering my opportunities.
Rather than being illegal, my robber baron capitalism is subsidized since I am helping stabilize the grid. The European Union even mandates that I have the right to exploit. My neighbors in the apartment complex, without solar panels or home batteries, had to pay the full price of their fixed tariff energy accounts. Meanwhile, I was not only getting free energy, I was able to profit from their misfortune by selling them those high-tariff kilowatts during peak hours that I was actually paid to load up.
While the salesman was appealing to my self-interest to be able to sell me a far larger battery than my wife and I would ever need, I kept looking out the window at my neighbors, the ones who voted for the Green and Socialist parties in the last election. As if I didn’t feel the obscenity of it all, I was then informed that if I had an electric car, I could store and trade even more energy through the car battery. So it is no longer a car. That was a feature too far – even I know that an EV is the most unsustainable thing I could possibly own. My neighbors can no longer afford cars because the government-demanded transition to EVs has pushed the price of mobility out of their reach.
I would tell them to take the bus but public transport support is being slashed as governments have to spend more to fund the energy transition subsidies. What a wonderful age for fat-cat capitalist exploitation!
Green Capitalism
The ideal world the Greens and Socialists have been dreaming of has led to a new generation of opportunists – green capitalists – who have spotted the gap in the market. My smart battery salesman has 40 solar panels in his garden (he realistically only needs seven or eight) and he proudly shared with me a spreadsheet with his return on investment and monthly income. Like any new form of capitalism, it will take a while for regulators to catch up and humanize the injustices. In the meantime, there will be even more winners as the green capitalists take advantage of the inequities and opportunities from the next wave of energy expansion required to meet the new data centers coming online.
I was told I could easily stack more batteries in my garage. The opportunities to profit here are endless.
My neighbors in the apartment complex, renters, don’t have the means to enter this lucrative energy market. They have candles. I try not to imagine how vulnerable they will become during this upcoming energy crises. What is even more obscene is that the Belgian government will likely, once again, give grants to all citizens (voters) to help ease the high energy costs from the US-Iran war. Once again, I will bank that money.
I am a robber baron of the new green capitalism and I should not be allowed to profit from the misfortune of others. But as my government has committed to meeting the UN climate goals, move to some mythical net-zero and complete the unnecessary transition to renewables, I am considered a hero of the green economy. I try not to think of what I am doing to the environment with my unsustainable solar panels and monster smart battery, or how I am profiting while my neighbors’ struggle.
I just consider myself a Ukrainian peasant at heart, with some good fortune, trying as always to save some money. It’s in my blood.