This is a news story about a man who installed 35 solar panels on his home.
http://www.anonews.co/man-still-has-to-pay-tax-for-energy-he-generates-himself/This man pays electricity taxes on every watt of energy his house consumes, even though he is self sufficient & produces more energy than he consumes from the power grid.
Should he pay taxes for a service rendered by the state which he does not utilize?
Crypto taxes are a hot topic in this section. This news story could in the future apply to crypto mining. Imagine if someone bought enough solar panels to power their bitcoin mining operation. And the state charged them for every kilowatt hour of energy their bitcoin miners consume, even though their operation is fully powered independently outside of state generated or regulated electrical grids.
This news story reminds me of this case where uganda tried to tax its citizens for using social media websites like twitter and facebook:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4614685.0What are peoples thoughts on this?
For every electricity bill, it's made up of two components which is the electricity bill itself, and the tax element. Depending on the tax law of the country, most times the value of the electricity taxes is dependent on the electricity bill as a huge user of megawatts is expected to pay more tax than a household user but in the case of this man whose electricity bill is Zero then the tax to be charged is zero. On the other hand, if the tax law over there would levy tax irrespective of the amount of megawatts you used, then its only the portion of tax he would be liable to pay.
The point is, for someone to be intelligent enough to generate his own electricity, then he should not be lazy to read the tax law and maybe require the service of an expert for adequate interpretation as government agencies sometimes in their quest to generate revenue apply the law in a blanket manner without considering the exceptions embedded in such law.