Nov 2009 to Sep 2011 - Closed on 29 December 2011 State government feed-in tariff schemes State However commentators have suggested that Martin Ferguson's comments are ideologically driven and do not take into account the Merit Order Effect which in some instance negates or almost negates the cost of funding FiTs and in other instances shows funding FiTs delivers a net dividend to consumers. He also suggested that an Australian solar feed-in tariff may lead to greater PV panel imports rather than a significant expansion of Australian production. In response to the German feed-in tariff for solar, he suggested that Germany's solar subsidy meant German consumers paid more than €1 billion in additional power bills in 2007 to generate around 0.5% of Germany's gross electricity consumption, suggesting that the policy does not deliver value for money. In a speech, the Federal Minister for Energy, Martin Ferguson, said that feed-in tariffs are technologically prescriptive and ideologically based, rather than being a market based mechanism. More than 23,000 people have signed an online petition for a national gross feed-in tariff. The bill was the subject of an inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts. In July 2008, a bill was introduced by Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne, (Tasmania), called the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Amendment (Feed-In Tariff) Bill 2008. However, a capital grant/rebate was offered of up to $8,000 per household for domestic installations and 50% for school installations up until June 2009. The Federal Parliament has not yet enacted a national gross feed-in tariff scheme for renewable energy. National feed-in tariff systems have been enacted in numerous countries including Brazil, Canada, China and many EU countries. Proposed federal gross feed-in tariff scheme Ī uniform federal scheme to supersede all State schemes has been proposed by Tasmanian Greens Senator Christine Milne, but not enacted. The ACT and New South Wales had gross feed-in tariffs, which were subsequently replaced with net feed-in tariffs. Net FIT schemes effectively use the same rate for the use of electricity by household producers as for sale into the grid (i.e., use of electricity by the household reduces the amount of electricity available to feed into the grid), and accordingly the subsidy to household producers is generally less in overall terms. The effective difference is that household producers under a gross scheme pay for electricity from the electricity retailer for household consumption at the market rate while all the power produced by them is sold to the retailer at the higher subsided FIT rate. The issue still remains as to what level the FIT rate should be set – e.g., at the cost of production, at market rates, at the cost at which the retailer sells electricity, or at the rate at which the retailer can acquire electricity in the wholesale market, while others set them at premium or subsidy levels. Critics of net FIT argue that gross tariffs conform to the normal definition of a feed-in tariff, and provide a more certain financial return, paying for all electricity produced, even if it is consumed by the producer, reducing or helping meet peak demand. They have been described as a "fake feed-in tariff". Net feed-in tariff schemes have been criticised for not providing enough incentive for households to install solar panels and thus for not effectively encouraging the uptake of solar PV. Some schemes are based on a gross feed-in tariff model while most are based on a net tariff. They are a way of subsidising and encouraging uptake of renewable energy and in Australia have been enacted at the State level, in conjunction with a federal mandatory renewable energy target.Īustralian FIT schemes tend to focus on providing support to solar PV particularly in the residential context, and project limits on installed capacity (such as 10 kW in NSW) mean effectively that FITs do not support large scale projects such as wind farms or solar thermal power stations. Electricity generation from renewable sources in Australia, 2010įeed-in tariffs in Australia are the feed-in tariffs (FITs) paid under various State schemes to non-commercial producers of electricity generated by solar photovoltaic (PV) systems using solar panels.
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