Profit from backyard 'green power'

The government is to meet its renewable energy targets by paying householders to generate electricity at home. But can you really make any money from such a scheme? It's risky, says Merryn Somerset Webb, but the numbers do look good.

In 1958, Chairman Mao set China's steel production target for the year at 10.7m tons. It wasn't long before it became perfectly clear that the country did not have a hope of meeting it however flat out he demanded that its mills and mines should work.

So Mao roped in the general population with his "backyard furnace" plan. This forced millions of already exceptionally miserable peasants to build mini-furnaces in their villages and chuck in every piece of metal they had from wheels to door handles in a desperate effort to meet their mad dictator's need to "overtake America".

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.