Hawaii’s initiative will make it possible for homeowners and businesses to sell power they generate from small to medium-scale renewable energy projects (i.e. solar panels) to Hawaii’s main power producers at higher than market-value rates.

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Governor Schwarzenegger just gave solar power a boost in California, especially for relatively small-scale solar generators.

Taking notes from Europe, perhaps, Schwarzenegger signed legislation for a “feed-in tariff” earlier this week that requires Calfornia utilities buy solar power from relatively small generators and at higher than market-value prices.

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Dairy farm anaerobic lagoons without covers

The first large scale biogas plant linked to a beef feedlot, could make a more significant contribution to renewable energy in South Africa than the planned 3.8 MW of electricity, by advancing the technology in South Africa.

The Business

Independent power producer (IPP) Lesedi Biogas Project (LBP) is planning to build one of the world’s largest open-air feedlot manure-to-power plants, in Heidelberg, near Johannesburg, South Africa. Such plants use the anaerobic fermentation (bacterial fermentation of organic waste, with little or no oxygen present) to produce a methane rich gas which can be used to produce electricity or burn for heat.

The plant will be situated at the Karan Beef feedlot, which will supply the manure from its feedlot to the LBP. This would initially amount to 110,000 tons per year of manure, which would allow the production of 3,8 MW of base-load power reaching 6,2 MW of peak power.

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SMUD has introduced a Feed-in Tariff to pay producers for renewable energy beginning in 2010. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District is the nation’s sixth largest publicly owned utility, with 1.4 million customers in Northern California.

California already does offer a little known Feed-in Tariff or FIT, but the rates are somewhat anemic; paying between $0.08 and $0.19 cents a kWh. The costs to “feed in” are so undefined,  it has few takers, totaling only 14 MW, according to a new NREL analysis of FIT policy design. Of developers and residents who adopt solar; 97% opt for the California Solar Initiative rebate which pays a known amount upfront for estimated production.

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Iowa. In 2006, according to the Iowa Utilities Board, wind power provided 5 percent of the state’s electricity. Now, just three years later,  Iowa produces between 15 and 17 percent of its own electricity from wind power.

MidAmerican Energy, Iowa’s biggest utility, pays farmers $3,500 a year (plus 2% increase annually) to rent locations for 102 wind turbines. To scout the best locations, they paid $5 an acre to survey likely farmland, and will pay $10 an acre per year to keep those options open for future additional wind turbines.

Photo: Sonia Fridman

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Los Angeles’ Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has announced that his city will not buy electricity produced in coal fired fired power plants from 2020 instead the city will switch to cleaner energy sources to fulfill its power demands.

California has no coal-fired power plants and Los Angeles will stop buying coal generated power that it buys from other states. The 40 percent power that comes from coal-fired power plants will be taken from power plants running on cleaner sources like natural gas, nuclear energy and hydro power. This is in addition to the city’s energy efficiency plans under which it seeks to reduce energy consumption by 1 percent every year for the next ten years.

Los Angeles has set a great example for the big cities which are busy economic centers with huge energy demands. Energy consumption in rapidly growing cities of the developing countries is growing at astronomical rates. Usually the simple solution is to produce more energy, set up coal-fired power plants since coal is easily available and cheap. However, long term solutions to this energy problem are often overlooked. Countries eying faster economic growth must explore such alternatives and work to develop them as they hold the key to the problem of not just energy consumption but rising carbon emissions and climate change as well.

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As U.S. policymakers debate the best renewable policy for the country, many German experts are already convinced they know the answer: a feed-in tariff. Germany’s feed-in tariff, which offers generous set prices for renewable electricity fed into the grid, stimulated 1.5 gigawatts of new solar capacity last year, and similar programs also have boosted markets in countries such as Spain, Greece, Italy, Turkey and South Korea. All the fastest-growing solar markets in the world today have feed-in tariffs.

Gainesville, Fla., and Ontario, Canada, also recently created German-style feed-in tariffs, but the policy hasn’t yet taken hold as a U.S. state or federal policy. I recently wrote a post for Earth2Tech about the difficulties of implementing a German-style feed-in tariff in California: the policy isn’t responsive to market signals that would encourage electricity generation when and where it’s most needed, it’s more challenging to make work in places with lower conventional electricity prices and widely varying utilities with different restrictions, and it doesn’t address retail electricity or encourage customers to use less energy.

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Now, despite our real estate values dropping like a stone, there is still part of your building that you can use to generate a certain return yearly.

That is that abundant farmland that you have on your roof.

You didn’t know you have farmland on the roof? Northern California’s PG&E thinks so. If you have solar potential (a flat roof or 20 degree slope to the South, Southwest or Southeast with no shade) you could actually generate a decent return on investment, regardless of your declining property value, from your sunshine harvest.

You could earn 8% a year on an investment in a solar roof. How?
Read the rest of this at Green Building Elements

Which state pays you the most money to make solar power?

Florida. One public utility in Florida began the most generous Feed-in Tariff in the US. Gainesville pays you $0.32 per kWh in a 20 year contracts for solar electricity generation. Despite serving a tiny population of only 90,000, Gainesville’s utility expects to install 4 MW of solar in just the first year offering the program.

Feed-in Tariffs are what grew Spain and Germany into world leading solar powerhouses. Al Gore called it an electranet idea: that anyone can contribute solar power from their roof and sell it to their utility. Now California and Vermont and other states are trying to replicate Florida’s success with new and better Feed-in Tariff policy design.

Image: Mojave Desert

Which states make the most power from “waste not - want not”?

The South Atlantic States make the most power from biomass, which has almost unlimited potential because it’s the ultimate recycled material. Various forms of bio energy can be made from virtually any naturally replenishing organic matter.

Biodiesel or ethanol fuels can be made not just from dedicated crops but from all kinds of wastes; vegetable or protein, agricultural wastes and residues, dairy farming operations, wood waste, aquatic weeds, animal wastes, landfill gases and other waste materials.

Image: Ben Visbeek

Which state gets 13 percent of its power from renewable sources?

California. By 2007 California utilities were getting 13 percent of their electricity from renewable sources according to the most recent figure at the CPUC. Actually, the RPS requirements are for utilities to get 20% by 2010, but approval problems related to the transmission grid are making that goal a bit of a stretch though here’s no shortage of announced mega deals for solar farms in the desert with California utilities.

By contrast, the 2007 California Solar Initiative is on target to easily exceed its 10 year goal of getting 3,000 MW of solar onto the grid; just using individual rooftops. No new transmission lines are needed and it is funded with $3.3 billion in incentives (in a sliding scale based on actual electricity production) to ease the upfront cost to homeowners and businesses.

Image: flikr user jimthatcher

Which oil-rich state makes the most wind power in America?

Texas. To the surprise of the local oil industry, Texas is now good for 8,000 MW of pure power from wind. Texas has more than met its Renewable Portfolio Standard that required Texas utilities to get 3% of their power from renewables by 2009 that then-Governor George Bush signed into law in 1999, while preparing to run against Al Gore for president. Or perhaps the idea was to restrict it to 3%? You get what you ask for, I guess.

But, once Texans got into wind they surpassed their RPS requirement. Texas now makes 5% of their electricity from wind, and the state of Texas now makes more wind power than any nation behind comparably sized Germany with 22,000 MW, (which also meets only 3% of Germany’s needs.)

Image: Flikr user frogdog

Which state gets 30% of its electricity from renewable power?

Maine. The reason that Maine is ahead of many other states is that it set very high renewable energy goals; very early on. It put a RPS* goal in place in the 1990’s to get 30% renewable energy by 2000 and an additional 1% annually. Maine also gets an additional 22% from its abundant hydro power, bringing technically carbon-free electricity to 55%, but hydro is not included in renewable power counts.

A *Renewable Portfolio Standard requires utilities to buy an increasing percent of power from renewable sources. Result? Renewable energy supplied 30% of their electricity by 2005. Not 35% Still; not too shabby. If you aim high; you’ll get further than with no goals at all.

Photo: Sonia Fridman

Which of our islands gets 57% of its power from renewable sources?

The Island of Alameda: near downtown Oakland in Northern California. Because it is a public utility; Alameda Municipal Power doesn’t have to make a profit. AMP customers of  have long gotten the majority of their now very cheap energy from geothermal power contracts that were signed long ago with The Geysers. Now 41% of their energy comes from geothermal, 9% from landfill gas, and 6% from wind.

Alameda businesses and residents pay 22% lower rates than surrounding customers, as the utility’s costs are already sunk (those geothermal power stations were paid for years ago) and like all renewable power sources; the fuel is free forever.

The trail blazed by Alameda shows us that once the initial investment in renewable energy is paid, future generations benefit from the low cost of free fuel.

Image: Flikr user Ilja

In which nation did wind power provide nearly half of all the new electricity added last year?

The United States of America as a whole added more wind power (42%) than any other source to the grid last year, more than any nation in the world - mostly among the states with legislative requirements to get more energy from renewable power.

If this year’s big Climate Bill passes with the best of Waxman’s HR 2454, many more states will find a way to add as much renewable power as these states that already have policies that were designed to encourage it. As you see, it’s not beyond us.

For example, the Dakotas have far more wind potential than Iowa, but no legislative push to get wind going there. Even the smallest goal like Texas’ 3% got Texas moving - and now that’s an unstoppable force!

So when the naysayers say, and they will, that we can only ever supply a few percent of our electricity from renewable power, let them know of these examples. And add the ones I missed in the comments.

As they put it in the Musical; South Pacific:
If you don’t have a dream…how can you make a dream come true?

Image: Nick Hess

Think of the Czech Republic and you’re more likely to think of beer, castles or Kafka than solar power. But the Eastern European country is one of the world’s fastest-growing markets, says Jenny Chase, a senior associate with London-based research firm New Energy Finance.

The country installed 50.8 megawatts of solar power last year, up dramatically from only 3 megawatts in 2007, she says. The bulk of that capacity — 31.5 megawatts — got installed in December, which represented more than fivefold growth from the 5.81 megawatts installed in November.

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Wrong.

The so-called feed-in tariff will guarantee payment for any power produced over the subsequent 20 years.

For some, the feed-in tariff is a long time coming. Advocates see the immediate potential the policy mechanism can have on growing renewable energy generation, as well as the impact said growth can have on the burgeoning solar, wind, and other clean energy industries.

Feed-in tariffs have been responsible for meteoric rise in renewable energy generation and the industries supporting it in Germany, Spain, and Denmark, but they have yet to take hold in the U.S., largely because of the fragmented nature of our electricity generation and transmission.

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An Australian Senate Committee has recommended the Senate take no immediate action to rollout a national renewable energy feed-in tariff to boost the investment and deployment of renewables. Pressure has been mounting in Australia for the federal government to take a more aggressive stance on developing renewable energy.

The Australian Greens are calling the move a stall-tactic that avoids a discussion about feed-in tariffs being the best way to supplement the country’s mandatory renewable energy targets.

>>More on feed-in tariffs

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U.S. Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA), Bill Delahunt (D-MA), Jim McDermott (D-WA), and Mike Honda (D-CA) introduced landmark legislation [PDF] on Thursday that will provide security for investments in the renewable-energy sector by guaranteeing rates for renewable-energy generation.

This policy mechanism, also known as a national feed-in tariff, may be the single most effective tool to expand renewable energy development that we know of. Feed-in tariffs have been introduced in several U.S. states, but none have the bills have been passed into law.

The International Energy Agency, the European Commission and the United Kingdom’s Stern Review have determined that feed-in tariff policies in Germany, Spain, France and other European Union countries have achieved larger renewable energy deployment at lower costs, compared with policies in other European Union countries.

The legislation has two principle titles. The first would streamline interconnection standards and the patchwork of policies currently governing interconnection. The second title addresses the actual process of setting of renewable energy tariffs, and what would qualify. This bill would not only apply to the mom and pop backyard wind turbines, and rooftop solar - the tariff extends to projects as large as 20 megawatts!

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GM is backing a hydrogen refueling station near Los Angeles. The station will be located at Clean Energy’s compressed natural gas (CNG) facility and should be operational by the fall (gas 2.0).

U.S. Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA) will introduce a national renewable energy feed-in tariff. Under the bill, utilities would be required to pay a set price to anyone supplying less than 20MW of renewable electricity to the grid. Inslee plans to introduce the bill in the next week or two. But requiring utilities to pay a mandated amount for renewable energy is “a new idea to D.C., and like a fine wine it’ll need time” (ecopolitology).

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Conservatives call into question highly successful feed-in tariff

There is a reason that Germany has half of the world’s installed solar generating capacity, and it is not the Northern European country’s boundless sunshine. Renewable energy capacity has achieved such tremendous growth because of the German government’s aggressive energy policy.

The policy vehicle responsible for the rapid acceleration of the country’s renewable energy capacity, known as a feed-in tariff (FIT), guarantees a fixed-rate of return for homeowners and farmers who install solar, wind, small hydro, biomass, and methane capturing systems and sell their surplus electricity back to the grid. Germany has Europe’s highest feed-in tariffs, allowing consumers to earn around 40 euro cents ($0.62) per kWh compared to paying retail rates of 18 euro cents per kWh after taxes and support fees.

Electricity generated through Germany’s feed-in law produces about 50 terawatt-hours (billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity per year, or nearly 15% of German electricity consumption (1). This adds an average of only 1.01 euros ($1.69) a month to a typical home electricity bill.

Bu, despite the law’s success, conservatives in the German Bundestag want to ratchet back the incentives that support renewable energy development.

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The same thing will happen if the renewable energy tax credits expire

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Feed-in tariffs have proven remarkably successful throughout Europe, and especially in Germany, where some 55% of the world’s solar power capacity resides. I have covered the nuts and bolts of the FIT here and I have made a short argument for them here (but for a more comprehensive treatment of how and why the policy mechanism works, I recommend visiting the World Future Council’s PACT website, which is a powerful resource for advocates, policymakers, environmentalists, tech geeks and regular folks).

In a nutshell, a feed-in tariff offers a long-term guaranteed price contract (usually about 15-20 years) to any entity that contributes electricity to the grid via renewable sources like solar, wind, biomass, landfill gas, small hydro, geothermal and methane. Whereas existing policy mechanisms like the production tax credit favor large corporations with sizable tax liability, and investment tax credits favor those folks who can afford a large upfront cost that comes with a 20-30 year payoff, this policy tool encourages the distributed generation of renewable energy and it levels the playing field by providing long-term investment security for small businesses, homeowners, churches, schools and others, so they are more willing to make the financial commitment that is necessary for installing renewable energy themselves.

This is not to say that our existing RE policy tools of choice (including renewable energy standards) are inherently bad, but they may be insufficient to spark the kind of growth in clean energy the public seems to be demanding.

The diffusion of renewable energy FITs has extended from Northern Europe to include some 47 countries worldwide, but the mechanism has yet to gain much political traction in the United States. The bill is modeled after the legislation proposed in the fall of 2007, when Rep. Kathleen Law introduced HB 5218 into the Michigan House of Representatives. Continued…

Ironically, while the eyes of renewable energy policy wonks (yes, there are such a thing) have been looking to California, Michigan and Minnesota for a successful German-style feed-in tariff, Rep. May’s bill took people by surprise. But the fact that Rep. May has introduced it, is less surprising, as the four-term legislator has been the recipient of the Environmental Leadership Award from the Illinois Environmental Council and has been consistently endorsed by the Illinois League of Conservation Voters.

According to renewable energy expert Paul Gipe, “Representative May’s bill would create a full system of feed-in tariffs with prices for an array of renewable energy technologies. Currently, the only true feed-in tariff system in North America is the limited program offered in Ontario.”

The Ontario limited offer program, along with the regional climate change agreement signed by the Midwestern Governor’s Association last November, and talk of FIT legislation in Michigan, Minnesota and now Illinois, is positioning the upper midwest to compete with other emerging clean energy hubs like Colorado, California, and New York/New England.

The proposed Illinois tariffs are virtually identical to those equivalent to the actual ones in Germany as well as the proposed ones in Michigan.

• Hydro less than 500 kW……………………………………………………………$0.10/kWh
• Biogas/Biomass less than 150 kW………………………………………………….$0.145/kWh
• Geothermal less than 5 MW…………………………………………………….$0.19/kWh
• Wind……………………………………………………………………………..$0.105/kWh
• Wind energy from small wind turbines…………………………………………….$0.25/kWh
• Rooftop solar less than 30 kW………………………………………………………..$0.65/kWh
• Solar façade cladding less than 30 kW………………………………………………$0.71/kWh

As you can see, not all technologies are treated the same in terms of the price the utility is required to purchase the electricity for. Solar PV has the highest payout because it is the most expensive to install, but it is also some of the easiest to adopt on a large scale. Wind has a much lower tariff because the technology costs much less to install, and the payoff-date would arrive more quickly. The formulas are essentially designed so that regardless of what RE technology you install, the payoff time will be roughly the same. And after you have finished paying off your initial investment, you begin to pocket the rest, or, as many are doing in Germany, you can re-invest in more panels with more long-term guaranteed power purchase agreements from the utility.

It should also be noted that most FITs are adjustable or they adjust automatically. By lowering the cost of the payout, it is believed to drive more technological investment and research in more efficient processes. In other words, if you have a guaranteed rate for 20 years with a 30% efficient solar panel, and businesses know that you have this guaranteed rate, why should they innovate?

Full Text of HB 5855