The Alliance for Renewable Energy

Spotlight: Global Feed-in Tariff Website

While the Alliance for Renewable Energy primarily focuses on North American feed-in tariffs, with detailed information for each state and province considering FIT legislation, the Global Feed-in Tariff website is a great resource for those looking for news about regions outside of the United States. In their own words:

Global Feed in Tariffs was set up in April 2010 with the aim of providing information to anyone globally wanting to find out about the FiT policy. Released today is the basis of a resource which will grow and grow with time into one of the most comprehensive Feed in Tariff resources worldwide. It provides information on each of the 59 country or state-wide Feed in Tariffs in operation today and also looks at those countries which will shortly be added to the list of 59. The resource will be updated daily in order to provide an as accurate and reliable information source as possible.

Check out the website.

Italy Surpasses US in Solar PV

 

From Wind-Works.org:

In a dramatic display of the power feed-in tariffs have in driving markets, Italy installed more solar photovoltaics (PV) in 2009 than the entire US. Moreover, within the first quarter of 2010, Italy's total installed solar PV capacity was expected to exceed that of the US.

Italy installed 720 MW of solar PV in 2009, nearly all of that on rooftops. In contrast, the US installed 435 MW during the same period, according to a draft report by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC).

Italy introduced a system of feed-in tariffs for solar PV in February, 2007 after concluding that the previous program of Tradable Green Certificates was not delivering the results desired.

By the end of 2007, Italy had installed five times more solar PV than in the previous year. Despite numerous bureaucratic roadblocks, the solar industry took off in 2008 and installed nearly 350 MW, then a record-breaking number. Solar PV installations have been doubling since then and are expected to reach 1,500 MW in 2010.

Read more.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user francesco sgroi, shared under a Creative Commons license.)

Feed-in Tariffs in Lebanon: A Master's Thesis

Hamed Beheshti, a Master's student at the American University of Beirut, has just published his Master's Thesis, "Exploring Renewable Energy Policy in Lebanon: Feed-in Tariff as a Policy Tool in the Electricity Sector." This in-depth paper utilized the research and reports available on the ARE website.

We highly encourage you to read this paper if you are interested in learning how Lebanon or other Middle Eastern countries could adopt a FIT policy; the paper deftly outlines the challenges involved in enacting Lebanese FIT legislation.

The author has graciously given us permission to publish his thesis on the ARE website. Download it here:  Exploring Renewable Energy Policy in Lebanon: Feed-in Tariff as a Policy Tool in the Electricity Sector

(Photo shared by Flickr user austinevan under a Creative Commons license.)