Public to pay heavily towards Government green subsidies

Let the punishment fit the crime.

The crime is profligate waste of finite resources.

Increase the cost of consuming the finite resource and use the proceeds to provide alternative infinite resource.

I don't understand why this logic is not self evident even to Daily Mail writers/readers.

It is clear that some people are against the cost of Renewable Energy and subsidies, but do they consider the long term?

What never gets mentioned is that when the FiT payments stop, the Wind Turbines and Solar Panels keep on working. Some of the least efficient ones may get decommissioned, but the vast majority will be providing very cheap electricity. The Energy companies will be able to buy this energy at a fraction of the cost of that produced by fossil fuels.

So the subsidies are just the cost of upfront investment.

Personally I think the government should be doing far more. For instance, every new build house should have a south facing roof made entirely of solar panels not tiles.

Yes yes yes. 

Far more sensible than bribing fat cat landowners to fill fields full of panels (and enduring all the transmission losses getting the supply to the consumer). 
And far better to make it part of standard construction with all the materials bought at trade prices, not hawked door to door by salespeople out to make the biggest commission they can gouge out of the residents.

The current limitation on solar expansion is storage, essentially the need for giant batteries to hold release energy after the sun goes down. Pumping water uphill at to ims of peak supply for use in later hydro electric generation is one way to do this, but these tend not to be near population centres. Wind and tidal are more consistent generators and really more suitable for less sunny northern countries. A 'smart' electricity network which moves electricity to respond to demand is also desirable, but the electricity generating companies are not investing in this. Unfortunately hysteria about their 5% profit margin and threats to cap electricity prices add to the disincentive for them to invest.

Interestingly, I was reading that electricity consumption has fallen rapidly due to adoption of energy efficient consumer goods (flat screen TVs etc), and that in the US by far the biggest area where electricity demand was rising was from electric cars. This article was pointing out that it was bizarre that that no electricity supply company had invested anything on electric car charging points, inspite of their being mon the edge of a vast market where electricity can directly replace petrol. The figures were from California where there are a lot of early adopters and the rise on consumption was significant.

Of course, all cars will be electric and driverless in a few years time and will come to pick you up when you call for one.

I think batteries are the wrong tehnology. They are heavy (which increases energy consumption) and they use nasty/rare chemicals which cost a lot of energy to produce.

Fuel cells are a much better idea and their time should come, probably running on hydrogen derived from electrolysis. Give it 20-30 years.

And this feeds straight back into the "electric car" debate, too. On our plot, just at the back of our garage, is the transformer serving us, our six neighbours in this little hamlet, and the farm next door. There are three-phase 11kV high voltage lines heading to it. Last year, as part of a stack of work Western Power did, they replaced the transformer and the pole it lives up. Did they replace it with a big, beefy three-phase transformer ready for decades of possible expansion and upgrade? They did not. They put a shiny new single-phase 300A transformer with a 200A fuse on it.

It doesn't take a lot of understanding of watts = amps x volts to see that's not going to allow very much electric car charging, or to see that it's a serious cap on feeding power back to the grid. The typical 30A domestic chargers would take north of 12 hours to fully charge a Tesla electric car, not the "under an hour" that the marketing boasts of at fast chargers (the nearest of which is probably not actually reachable in a round trip from here without recharging).

The other factor around PVs and the Feed-In Tariff is the uselessness of EPCs. We looked seriously at putting PVs in here - but, because our EPC score is low (despite the reality being that the house is very warm and well insulated - it's just that the person doing the EPC couldn't prod the actual insulation), we'd get a significantly lower FIT, making it a poor investment.