In today’s Guardian George Monbiot has written about the problems he envisages with the government’s plans to introduce a feed-in tariff for domestic renewable energy sources. The facts and politics of the piece are the subject for discussion elsewhere but the piece that intrigued me was his comment on how criminals would take advantage of the system.
“it can’t be long before thousands of petty criminals discover the perfect carousel fraud, bypassing their solar panels by connecting the incoming wire to the outgoing wire. By buying electricity for 7p and selling it for 44p (if you sell power to the grid rather than using it yourself, you get an extra 3p), they’ll make a 600% profit. Amazingly the government has decided not to measure how much electricity people are selling, but "to pay export tariffs on the basis of estimated (deemed) exports". Elsewhere in its report it boasts of "encouraging a risk-based approach to audit and assurance"”
This is still in the realms of theory but nonetheless it’s a brilliant example of criminal creativity.
via http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff