By Daniel Ferra (Contact)
To be delivered to: California Energy Commission, California Public Utility Comission and Governor Jerry Brown
California law does not allow home owners to size their Solar systems larger than what they use. In order to get the California Solar Initiative (CSI) rebate, the customer is not allowed to install a system that inherently over-produces more than what is needed for his home.
The Feed-in Tariff can not be earned if you receive a rebate from your utility company for solar panels or if you are participating in other utility solar incentives programs such as the CSI. It also can not be earned if you are participating in net metering, which only pays one time a year under the AB 920 California Solar Surplus Act.
Our Feed-In Tariff should mirror Germany, Japan, Vermont, Los Angeles County Ca. and Hawaii where residential FIT is 13 cents - 37 cents per kilowatt hour.
The California Public Utility commission can change the FIT to payment levels that are differentiated appropriately, and distribute the solution to all tax-paying citizens who should not be deliberately handcuffed. Residential homeowners should be allowed to oversize their Renewable Energy systems and participate in the State mandated goal to achieve 33% Renewable Energy by 2020
"Examples of how they (and our complicit energy “experts”) have been “slowing the process” are:
(1) Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) which create de facto caps on the deployment of renewable energies. (The Germans don’t have any RPSs. Their FIT program is open ended, the more capacity, the merrier!)
(2) Net-metering caps. Most states only allow a small percentage of one to two percent of peak load to be net-metered. There are exceptions however. Colorado, for example, has no aggregate capacity limit. However, most states do. Net-metering, therefore, will certainly “hold back the clean energy tide.”
(3) The third party leasing rent-to-own outfits like Sungevity, but more importantly, Solarcity, which just went public with an IPO, fight tooth and nail to protect scarce capacity carveouts (from the state RPSs) so as to bolster their chosen business models as the expense of all others. The same goes for the utility-scale folks. The in-fighting, due in part to the small de facto caps of the RPSs, have significantly slowed the deployment of renewables in the U.S.
(4) Most importantly is how we connect distributed renewable energies to the grid in the U.S., the most salient difference between the American net-metering program and the German feed-in tariff is that net-metering is *retail* energy whereas the FIT is *wholesale* energy. Thus, net-metering does little more than offset onsite loads and in the process it shifts the rate burdens of lost customers onto other ratepayers. Those rate burdens also include all of the utility’s overhead as well since compensation is at the retail rate. A FIT, on the other hand, as wholesale energy feeds the energy directly into the electric grid, and because it is must take wholesale energy it must be used first, and in many cases it will off set more expensive energies found on the grid, such as peaker plant power,spinning reserves and so forth saving rate payers money." Bob Tregilus.
Due to these laws, we have automatically taken out over 8 million roof tops, that would generate over 11,500MW of power, thats 5 San Onofre nuclear power plants.
We need to let our tax paying, Home Owning citizens in on a Feed in Tariff, and allow Homeowners to oversize their Renewable Energy Systems.
In the spirit of Bill McKibben and 350.org for our children and eaarth, lets make real global sustaining changes for all of us.
We are buying and selling clean air, all inhaling life sustaining pollution free air.
Dirty kilowatt vs Clean Kilowatt, what kind of air do you want to breath ?
The Feed in Tariff will address Global Warming, which is causing Climate Change.
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