Have You Ever Filled Your Electric Kettle With Water,

walked away and when returned to make a tea or coffee,

and realised you had not plugged it in? well this is sort of similar, in June of 2019, the city of Roubaix, France, announced with great fanfare that it had acquired 187 solar panels meant to generate part of the electricity required by the local library, the panels were installed by local company Sunretec at a cost of 103,000 euros ($113,000), the 187 solar panels were supposed to produce about a quarter of the energy required by the city library, all seemed well in the sustainability stakes, so much so that a wind turbine designed to produce clean energy as well was connected, and then the penny, sorry euro dropped, with all of the hoo-ha and celebrations, somebody had forgotten to plug the solar panels in! 

photograph eliseobabrera/Pixabay, so for six months the panels didn’t produce any of the electricity consumed by the Roubaix library,  “We realized that this was not the case,” Alexandre Garcin (LREM), deputy mayor of Roubaix, told La Voix du Nord, without going into details about how the blunder occurred, for some reason no one at city hall noticed that the library’s electricity bill hadn’t gone down at all after the panels were installed, note to self, remember to plug in the kettle next time!