California is a perfect example of RPS (Renewable Portfolio Standard) failure: Seven years after adopting a 20%-by-2010 RPS mandate, California's deployed renewable energy percentage has not changed!
California Legislators have realized that we need something new and so now, AB1106 is working its way through the Legislature. AB1106 is the bill that implements the REESA FIT and is currently the FIT Coalition's first priority.
Feed-in tariffs have proved to be the most successful policy for accelerated deployment of renewable energy.
Several governments in Europe and Canada have implemented feed-in tariffs to meet their RPS goals. Last year, Germany alone added ten time more solar-generation capacity than the state of California, despite California having a solar resource 50% better than Germany's.
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Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 10:47PM Ontario celebrates its successful feed-in-tariff program -- 8MW of renewableenergy. Washington State is anticipating a feed-in-tariff (Standard OfferContract- SOC) program to be led by John McCoy, Chairman of the Washington State House Committee on Techology, Energy and Communication.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 9:12AM The FIT Coalition submitted comments to the CARB addressing their first steps toward establishing an expansive 33%-by-2020 Renewable Electricity Standard (RES). The FIT Coalition outlines how CARB has a unique opportunity to enact a cost-effective, low-risk Feed-In Tariff (FIT) that would encourage further business investment in clean energy and help propel California toward its mandate of 33% renewable energy by 2020. This comment submission was part of CARB's first round of public input on RES.
Download the complete comments here (PDF).
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 4:22PM I expect that many of you have heard that SB32 was signed in to law by Governor Schwarzenegger on October 11th. A special thanks goes out to everyone who put in their letters-of-support to get that bill signed!
While SB32 was an incremental win for renewable energy, it is only a small step in implementing a simple, fair, and effective FIT program in California. To give you a sense of the significant work still to be done, here is a list of key activities (current and upcoming) in which the FIT Coalition is active:
Overall, the FIT Coalition is excited that there is so much activity happening around WDG FITs right now. In that respect it is good to be so busy! We are going to need a lot of help going forward, however, so please consider helping in any manner that you can, including financially. To give us the best chances for success, the FIT Coalition will need financial contributions from industry players, foundations, and/or well intentioned individuals who can help us truly scale renewables in America!
Please let us know how you can engage in the FIT Coalition efforts. In addition to financial support, we always welcome helpful contributions of time and energy, including taking up our call-to-actions when policymakers need to hear from folks.
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Ted Ko
Associate Executive Director
FIT Coalition
sb32; wdg; fit; update in news Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 4:48PM Paul Gipe over at Wind-Works.org has posted information about the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) call for Feed-in Tariff use worldwide.
ISES Calls for Feed-in Tariffs Worldwide
October 16, 2009
The International Solar Energy Society (ISES) has called for the use of feed-in tariffs worldwide at its world congress in Johannesburg, South Africa. This is the strongest endorsement yet from ISES of the policy that has sparked renewable energy development in Europe.
The resolution also calls for the world to reach 100 percent renewable energy by mid-century.
ISES also singled out the host country, South Africa, as an example for praise. South Africa has embarked on developing a full system of feed-in tariffs to help solve the country's electricity shortages and to send a signal to the nations meeting in Copenhagen that the developing world is willing to do its part.
The move by ISES, one of the world's oldest renewable energy organizations, follows recent announcements by China, India, Taiwan, and Japan that they will all soon introduce feed-in tariffs.
Below is the ISES resolution in full. REFIT is the acronym for Renewable Energy Feed-in Tariff. The Green Energy Act refers to the law passed by the Ontario provincial parliament in 2009 that, among many provisions, empowered the Minister of Energy to implement a comprehensive system of feed-in tariffs.
ISES Solar World Congress 2009
Johannesburg, South Africa, 11-14 October 2009
Resolution
The ISES Solar World Congress 2009 hosted by the Sustainable Energy Society of Southern Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa, attended by participants from all over the world resolves as follows:
The global target of 100 % renewable energies is both attainable and necessary by the middle of the current century. This is motivated on grounds of ecological, economic and social sustainability.
The unacceptable backlog in energy supply in the third world countries can only be covered cost effectively and in time by the use of renewable energies. Especially the industrialised countries have to increase their efforts in transitioning to renewable energies.
The world's governments are called upon to implement without further delay policies that have been proven internationally to be the most effective and efficient in the rapid transition to a renewable energy world, giving priority to renewable energy and refraining from any kind of caps that may slow down renewable energy deployment.
As a guiding principle, local and rural communities and people should be actively involved and benefit directly from renewable energies. Governments should especially encourage and support community power projects and distributed generation as well as investment in renewable energy manufacturing facilities in order to foster the local creation of jobs.
The Congress applauds the first steps taken by the South African Government in introducing the renewable energy feed-in tariff. The Congress requests government to urgently address concerns expressed by the public and by potential investors about aspects of REFIT policy. These include transparency, certainty, removal of contradictions between legislation and regulations governing the REFIT and providing a roadmap with clear commitments and timelines to its implementation.
The introduction of a Green Energy Act is strongly recommended as crucial to providing an overarching and comprehensive framework for renewable energy uptake so that in the near future the necessary steps will be taken to attract local as well as international investors.
The Congress strongly recommends the world's governments to establish an obligation to use renewable energy for water heating as well as space heating and cooling in residential, industrial, commercial and public sector buildings.
On the international level, the introduction of a global feed-in tariff system is recommended as a primary instrument to foster international technology transfer and finance scaling up of renewables, especially in the third world. Such a global feed-in tariff has the unique potential of overcoming the blockage in the current climate change negotiations.
For offgrid and non-electrical systems, further intelligent financing mechanisms such as large-scaled microcredit and soft loan programmes should be applied. All aspects of capacity building for renewable energy, including resource assessment, have to be given priority in education as well as in research and development. This is ineluctable in order to create awareness and knowledge of the true and full potential and vast variety of renewable energies as well as the true threats of fossil and nuclear energies.
The Congress welcomes and endorses the strong support and the cooperation of all the renewable energy technologies through the International Renewable Energy Alliance.
The Congress is delighted by the recent establishment of the International Renewable Energy Agency Irena and urges all renewable energy proponents worldwide as well as the world's governments to give full support to the establishment process in order to make sure that IRENA can realise its leadership role on our way to a renewable energy world.
Johannesburg, 14 October 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 9:59PM Thanks for your continued support of the FIT Coalition! We especially appreciate everyone who responded to the last update with helpful suggestions.
Today we sent the attached formal letter of support for SB 32 to the Governor and we're encouraging all of you to fax in your own letters as soon as possible. The signature deadline is this Sunday, October 11th and the Governor's Sacramento fax number is 916-558-3160.
Those of you who have been with us for a while know that the decision to support SB 32 was not taken lightly. We all agree that AB 1106 is a far superior bill that will create the true renewable energy boom that California needs. And there's no question that we'll be pushing AB 1106 with all our strength as early as possible.
But when AB 1106 was turned in to a 2-year bill, the question became: What can we get done *this year* to improve the policy environment for renewable energy deployment?
SB 32 does not fix the most important issue with the current FIT-like program in California: the price. But the bill does make certain key improvements, and once those are in the law, there is less heavy lifting for AB 1106 to do later.
Here are the changes we consider important:
Finally, for those who were following earlier versions of SB 32, the "poison pill" provisions that had been included by FIT-opponents were removed before the Assembly vote. This eliminated some of the bill's potentially damaging effects.
So, in the end, we decided that SB 32 is a positive step forward that we should support. We encourage you to add your voice of support also in the next day or two to help make these changes happen.
Thanks again for your support and feel free to contact us anytime with questions or to find out how you can help in the coming months!
Ted Ko
Associate Executive Director
FIT Coalition
