Had a light bulb moment this morning after reading yet another newspaper item on how the government has come up with yet another way to throw our money at the wind energy industry.

Apparently they are thinking of paying Ireland to use some of their waterspace to build even more of these useless monstrosities. Huhne and Hendry have come up with this latest scatterbrain idea in pursuit of the ludicrous commitment we made to the EU of 32% of our electricity from renewables within 9 years. It doesn’t seem to matter how many people raise concerns, nor how often we read about the hopeless performance of wind turbines – when the wind doesn’t blow fossil fuels kick in and when the wind does blow, but we don’t need the energy, we pay the companies a fortune to turn them off – our democratically elected leaders continue to throw our money at these things.

My light bulb moment came when I realised that those countries currently struggling with sovereign debt, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, would almost certainly have stopped subsidising things such as wind turbines by now. Likewise, they would also have stopped throwing money at foreign countries, via an overseas aid programme. Britain gives billions of £s to India even though that country is building its own nuclear weapons program, has a space programme to put an India in space and gives money to African countries via its own overseas aid programme!

Are we as taxpayers completely insane in putting up with these wasteful practices, perpetrated by those who were elected to represent our interests, whilst at the same time cutting back on everything in sight?

My lightbulb moment by the way – join the Euro as quickly as possible and become one of the PIGS. I don’t think you’ll find Greece throwing money at the wind energy industry or giving India hundreds of millions of Greek Euros do you?