Your corruption, my corruption

Our lives are a consequence of how money flows in politics. We rarely think about it!

It is amazing how the alignment of the political systems has second-order effects that one would not even foresee.

I wrote; Power begets money in the East while Money begets power in the West in this post.

I was recently recording a podcast about solar energy penetration in India. The question of net metering came up. Since I had seen it in Europe, I pondered; Why net metering and returning energy to the grid is normal for homes in the West but not the case in India.

In the West, at a per unit level, the individual electricity bill is far greater than that of the business. Businesses have their power subsidized. This is because the government is bought and sold by corporates. The parties even proudly advertise how much they have sold themselves for in the current election cycle. The quid pro quo plays out in the form of lower costs, lower taxes and a host of other benefits that businesses receive.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

By contrast, politicians pay the masses to vote them into power in India. I don’t know if carrying sacks of cash to “convince” the electorate is normal in other Eastern nations, but it is normal in India. Another way of bribing the populace is by subsidizing a whole bunch of things. The Karnataka government promised and in some parts delivered free electricity to households after winning the elections.

Who in their right mind would want to buy solar panels and set up net metering in such an environment? Businesses, on the other hand, have to pay a higher rate in India for electricity. Therefore net metering is something they set up.

Hence the political systems end up determining who gets renewable energy and who moves towards decentralization!