Saturday, June 4, 2022

The Gold Rush of Photovoltaic Energy: scams are unavoidable, but they might not be a bad sign!

 


Recently, Fox News investigated some companies engaged in selling PV plants to individual customers. As you would have expected, there have been cases in which the customer was promised impossible results. The customer had to pay for plants that didn't work as promised or that could not be connected to the grid for lack of the needed permits. 

It is nothing new. It also happened in Italy some ten years ago, when the government provided a relatively high financial support for PV plants. That led to plenty of people to rush into the market, many of them without the necessary competence, and some being pure scammers. 

It happens every time a market starts lifting off: do you remember the story of the California gold rush of 1849? Lots of scammers would cheat in all possible ways: selling fake digging permits, selling plots where they had "planted" gold nuggets but contained none, or simply robbing the forty-niners. Bad. But is also true that the gold was there for real. 

It is the same for photovoltaic energy: it is the gold of our times. And the gold is there for real: it is the sun. Scams are just a symptom of a true "PV rush" that will lead us out of the current mess. 


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