Yeah, but no, but yeah, but....

We have no inside knowledge about this claim at all. We do have more general knowledge about the idea of the claim.

Wind farm owners are being investigated by the energy watchdog for alleged market manipulation after they were accused of overcharging consumers by £100m.

Ofgem is to examine claims that renewable energy companies artificially inflated compensation payments given to them for switching off their turbines on windy days when the grid did not need extra capacity.

It has been handed a dossier gathered by analysts at the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), which suggests wind farm companies could be boosting the price of “virtual energy” they never actually generated.

Nope, no idea as to the truth of that. But yeah, the idea that such a thing might happen?

It’s inevitable in any complex system.

Any Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg to Americans) scheme to do anything will be gamed. Simply because that’s what humans do - look at the rules, consider the possibilities then do whatever appears to them to be beneficial to their enlightened self-interest. Man wrote a book explaining this 248 years ago, time enough for the idea to sink in.

The answer to which is to not have complex schemes. True, there really are things that need to be done. Say, internalising externalities. Therefore don’t have a complex scheme to achieve that, have a simple scheme to achieve that.

Another way to put this is that bureaucrats designing rules about other peoples’ money are not going to be as eagle-eyed on the gaps in the rules as those playing against the bureaucrats to the benefit of their own wallets. Or, again, rules will be gamed.

KISS is not just an acronym you know, it’s a rule.