Feed In Tariffs - Cooperation Between Distributed Energy and Utlity Providers
This is a excerpt from the Fast Company series on Distributed Energy Generation. It reviews the emerging Distributed Energy Industry, ,and suggest feed in Tarrifs funded by a gneral utility tax. Editor In fact, wherever a little public funding has gotten the ball rolling, consumer appetite for micropower has been essentially bottomless. To see just how fast the microgrid can emerge, there's no better place to look than Germany, where the market has been blown open thanks to what's known as a feed-in tariff. If net metering is simply the right to sell your power back to the grid at retail price, a feed-in tariff adds a little sweetener on top, paid for by a surcharge on all customers' bills. In effect, feed-in tariffs offer the same financing deal to citizens at large that utilities get on any power plant they build. The tariffs have been successfully adopted in 47 countries -- but Germany is by far the global leader. The policy was introduced there back in 1999, and the in...