“typically aren’t subsidised these days”. I’d like to know where you live. Because I’m pretty sure energy production is heavily subsidised, monitored and managed by governments in most places in the world.
I’m in the UK, and I’ve worked building wind farms for the last 8 years. The contracts are obviously quite nuanced and varied, and any business is going to do whatever it can to get grants and such to increase their revenue, but most of the ones I’m familiar with include payments by the wind farm to the local community.
England doesn’t just not subsidise them, they’ve actively banned new onshore wind farms for the last 6 years - the main development has been in Scotland. This ban came in with an end to subsidies, and as a result a lot of the smaller installs (eg 1-3 turbines) stopped being built, and the return on value investment to be at scale (10+ turbines ~3MW each or higher). The downside to this is that you have fewer community projects, in favour of larger, typically foreign owned power plants. There’s also a lot less venture capitalists building wind/solar farms and then selling them on immediately on completion (which is probably a good thing).
My favourite little wind farm was entirely community owned in Wales, just 2 turbines. They have school kids visit up there and they modified this exercise bike with a dynamo to power things like a light bulb, fan, USB charger and inverter for AC, so all the kids can see how hard they have to peddle to make the electricity. When they opened the place they had a local rugby player kick a ball over the blades lol. This was one of the last built with subsidies, but all of the money from the electricity generated goes back into the local community.
As for energy production being monitored and managed, somewhat. The distribution and transmission operators have decent information, but not in depth down to the generators themselves. It’s all typically privately owned through multiple entities and the government doesn’t have a huge amount of oversight - at the end of the day they have to listen to the experts, and the experts work in the private sector for the power companies, not in government.
“typically aren’t subsidised these days”. I’d like to know where you live. Because I’m pretty sure energy production is heavily subsidised, monitored and managed by governments in most places in the world.
I’m in the UK, and I’ve worked building wind farms for the last 8 years. The contracts are obviously quite nuanced and varied, and any business is going to do whatever it can to get grants and such to increase their revenue, but most of the ones I’m familiar with include payments by the wind farm to the local community.
England doesn’t just not subsidise them, they’ve actively banned new onshore wind farms for the last 6 years - the main development has been in Scotland. This ban came in with an end to subsidies, and as a result a lot of the smaller installs (eg 1-3 turbines) stopped being built, and the return on value investment to be at scale (10+ turbines ~3MW each or higher). The downside to this is that you have fewer community projects, in favour of larger, typically foreign owned power plants. There’s also a lot less venture capitalists building wind/solar farms and then selling them on immediately on completion (which is probably a good thing).
My favourite little wind farm was entirely community owned in Wales, just 2 turbines. They have school kids visit up there and they modified this exercise bike with a dynamo to power things like a light bulb, fan, USB charger and inverter for AC, so all the kids can see how hard they have to peddle to make the electricity. When they opened the place they had a local rugby player kick a ball over the blades lol. This was one of the last built with subsidies, but all of the money from the electricity generated goes back into the local community.
As for energy production being monitored and managed, somewhat. The distribution and transmission operators have decent information, but not in depth down to the generators themselves. It’s all typically privately owned through multiple entities and the government doesn’t have a huge amount of oversight - at the end of the day they have to listen to the experts, and the experts work in the private sector for the power companies, not in government.