The Feed-In Tariff Model In Action

The International Feed-In Cooperation group, founded by the governments of Germany, Slovenia and Spain, held an event this past Tuesday at the COP15 meeting to share ideas and experiences from their highly successful adoption of feed-in tariffs for the promotion of renewable energy.

One of the problems with maintaining clean energy jobs in the US is that, as with our other manufacturing sectors, there's very little in the way of positive incentives for making anything within our borders. Germany has figured this out, to the point that their industries are still competitive even though they've been required to pay for the full lifecycle and disposal costs of all their product packaging for over a decade, a rule that I'm sure could never pass today's US Congress.

This shouldn't be a surprise. The most influential US business interests have routinely been on the wrong side of environmental issues, as well as wildly wrong in their 'end of business-as-we-know-it' predictions over every single tightening of environmental rules in keeping with emerging scientific research. A case in point, as US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke pointed out earlier today, according to @AP_ClimatePool, is that curbing acid rain cost only five percent of what industries were estimating, and he expects the same is true of climate change.

Measures that have been successful in promoting renewable electricity through feed-in tariffs are outlined in a comparison of FIT systems as reported by the Feed-In Cooperation initiative.

Those measures include Germany's guaranteed premium prices for renewable electricity production added to the grid, which covers installation expenses and controls costs by decreasing the added premium over a period of years until it's eliminated. Spain's experience with windfall profits being generated by rising prices for electricity has led them to establish both a floor and a cap for possible premiums paid to guarantee income for RES producers, with no premium being paid if market electricity prices exceed the cap. Slovenia also uses price guarantees, requiring network operators to contract with RES producers for 10 years from the day they first come on-line, and allowing the producers to decide on either a guaranteed annual premium or a guaranteed annual price. If a Slovenian producer accepts subsidized loans from the government as start-up capital, their premium guarantees are reduced by a certain percentage.

Dr. Harry Lehmann of Germany's Federal Environmental Agency laid out his vision of a sustainable energy future, and renewable electricity's place in it. The three keys, he said, were efficient energy conversion and use, behavioral shifts towards low energy lifestyles, and the coverage of remaining energy needs with renewable power sources.

Lehmann said Germany's 2020 goals included a 40 percent reduction in emissions from 1990 levels of 948 million tons of atmospheric carbon per year, believing it was achievable to get down to the 571 million tons that would be required to meet the target. His 2050 outlook was more ambitious. He said Germany's emissions needed to be cut to 95 percent of their 1990 levels, with 100% renewable energy, so that they'd have enough emission credits left over for heavy industry and cement production, among other needs.

While Lehmann's optimism and can-do attitude towards the situation might seem odd indeed to certain calcified naysayers in the US Senate, I believe it was boosted a great deal by the 280,000 new jobs he said the German renewable energy sector has added to their economy.

Considering that our energy use is about seven times that of Germany's that suggests our net job premium could be considerably higher. So where's the can-do spirit of our own policymakers?

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