Assembly Bill 1106 - Renewable Energy Generation Facilities: Feed-in Tariffs
Introduced in to the California Legislature February 27, 2009
Sponsors: Assembly Members Fuentes and Ruskin
Current Status
- AB1106 is currently in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Join our mailing list for the latest updates.
Bill Summary
(based on the current version, amended 06/25/09)
For full details on the bill go tohttp://www.leginfo.ca.gov/bilinfo.html and search for AB1106.
AB1106 amends the Public Utilities Code, Section 399.20, and adds a new section to the Code, Section 399.21
Main Provisions
- Existing Feed-in-Tariff program as described in 399.20 remains in effect until July 1, 2011
- All electrical corporations must publish a feed-in tariff for renewable electricity generation
- Does not cover local publicly-owned utilities
- Corporations under 100K customers are excepted from FIT at the discretion of the CPUC
- Projects are separated in to two tiers by project size: Tier 1 is up to 5MW, Tier 2 is over 5MW up to 10MW
- Tier 1 Projects priced based on cost of production plus reasonable rate of return
- Pricing is differentiated by technology
- Tier 1 contracts are 25 years
- Tier 2 Projects priced based on value of kwh generated, including Time of Day and other renewable energy attributes
- Tier 2 contracts can be 10, 15, or 20 years
- Tier 1 Projects priced based on cost of production plus reasonable rate of return
- Rates are revisited every 2 years
- Electricity counts towards the corporations RPS requirements and resource adequacy standards
- Facility may switch from net metering to feed-in tariff
Missing REESA Provisions
The following provisions are recommended additions/amendments to AB1106 in order to create a successful FIT policy for California
- The policy should include an annual cap of new generation capacity eligible for the feed-in tariff. Recommended that this cap be 2% of each corporations total annual delivered energy.
- The policy should apply to publicly-owned utilities, not just the IOUs
- The FIT Program should be phased in beginning July 1, 2010. Phasing can be done by technology, with solar coming first
- The policy should address interconnection barriers by requiring utilities to publish capacity information and upgrade plans for distribution circuits
- The policy should require one standard must-take contract across all corporations, rather than having each corporation implement their own
- The policy should provide a 20 year contract as an option for both tiers and should be the minimum contract length
- The policy should set a 2-year time limit for project deployment from the date of approval



