Mayor Pegeen Hanrahan is touting Gainesville’s environmental credentials as part of the Green Jobs for Florida delegation at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

People from around the world are hearing about Gainesville’s solar feed-in tariff, energy efficiency programs and planned biomass power plant.

“When I describe the actions we’ve taken, people I see internationally are really impressed that an American city is as far ahead as we are,” she said by conference call Wednesday.

As further confirmation of Gainesville’s green standing, Hanrahan was invited by the White House to sit on a panel of mayors todayThursday -Anthony Clark 12/16/09 4:09 PM to highlight the work of their cities, she said. Others include mayors of Seattle; Des Moines, Iowa; Albuquerque, N.M.; Sonoma County, Calif.; and North Little Rock, Ark.

Hanrahan said there was some doubt about whether that event will happen because of some of the chaos of the overcrowded conference.

She was calling from a train station that was under a bomb threat, “so if the phone goes dead, I might be dead,” she said wryly.

The delegation includes 25 people in business, government and research who are meeting with their counterparts from around the world to drum up business for the state and create jobs by providing the energy-efficient technology that will be needed to meet the climate goals of the conference.

Enterprise Florida expects companies from around the world to visit Florida in the spring and hopes the contacts made at the conference end with deals for Florida companies, said Christelle Maffre, the organization’s European representative.

She said she expects an announcement later on a deal with a French energy provider.

Florida is well situated to take advantage of the burgeoning green technology field thanks to policy decisions by Gov. Charlie Crist and the state Legislature, said Howell Ferguson, chairman and CEO of Lykes Bros. Inc. in Tampa, but policy-makers will have to continue to support green technology to keep up, he said.

“This type of meeting indicates everybody is now moving fast,” he said.

The delegation might come up with legislative proposals, said Kathy Baughman McLeod, chairwoman of the delegation and director of public policy at Bryant Miller Olive, a Tallahassee law firm.

“We’re talking to lots of governments that have incentives and legislation to improve and promote renewable energy,” she said.

Hanrahan said a lot of people think of climate change in terms of the challenges and costs, but she sees a lot of benefits to conservation efforts improving quality of life, reducing costs and providing economic opportunities.

“Two years ago, we had one solar company in Gainesville doing installations and today we have five,” she said.

She pointed to the work of the Gainesville Area Chamber of Commerce to promote the city’s “innovation economy” and the “cutting edge research” in biofuels and energy systems at the University of Florida.

The Green Jobs delegation also includes UF professor Tim Anderson, director of the Florida Energy Systems Consortium of Florida universities that coordinates research and education in energy.

No tax money was used to pay for the delegates’ travel, McLeod said. Hanrahan’s trip is being funded by Local Governments for Sustainability, of which she is a board member.

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A Ponte Vedra Beach solar energy firm plans to build a $1.7 million project in Gainesville and then sell the electricity produced to the utility, making it the company’s first significant Florida project.

Solar Energy Initiatives Inc.’s rooftop solar panels will have the capacity to produce 300 kilowatts to 400 kilowatts, said Gregory Bakeman, the company’s president. His company will sell the electricity to Gainesville Regional Utilities for 33 cents per kilowatt.

The utility’s program allows residents and small businesses to sell electricity. The feed-in tariff program, which was the first of its kind in the country, will add 4 megawatts worth of installation annually for the next 20 years. One megawatt-hour can power 250 homes.

The feed-in tariff program provides opportunities not only for local contractors, but also for manufacturers that have been hit by credit tightening. The 5 percent return on financing through the 20-year contract is a bright spot for investors,

“If more utilities did what Gainesville is doing, we’d be seeing a lot more activity,” Bakeman said. “Solar rebates are oversubscribed and the selling price for power makes economics challenging.”

JEA is waiting to see how Gainesville’s program works before deciding to pursue one here. The public-owned utility is revising its solar program so that customers who produce more electricity than they use to power their business or home will be reimbursed.

The Gainesville project, which will be finished in early 2010, is the latest of a string of contracts for Solar Energy Initiatives. It won a contract to build a $750 million, 300-megawatt solar park in West Texas and an $80 million project to build a 120-acre solar park in California.

Read More: Solar Energy to build Gainesville project - Jacksonville Business Journal:.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation Sunday that will create a European-style above-market tariff, called a feed-in tariff, for small solar-panel generators.

California’s abundant sunshine, relatively high utility rates and solar subsidies have already made the state one of the world’s top solar markets. The proposal seeks to expand the market by requiring California utilities to buy power from solar-panel generators of 1.5-3.0 megawatts in size, at set rates above what the utilities would pay for wholesale power from conventional sources.

Some solar companies said the bill’s pricing scheme would create a feed-in tariff of about 15 to 17 cents a kilowatt-hour, which they said wouldn’t be high enough to spur significant investment. But others said the program would create opportunities for lower-cost projects for which there isn’t currently a market.

Supporters of the legislation, including the California Solar Energy Industries Association, said the bill’s feed-in tariff will be high enough for schools, local governments, farms, warehouses and other low-cost property owners to take advantage of it.

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The feed-in tariff has proven to be the best way to get quick movement in renewable energy development and create a lot of jobs,” said state Rep. Matt Pierce (D), who has introduced a feed-in tariff proposal in Indiana. (New York Times)

In Florida, the Gainesville Regional Utilities adopted a feed-in tariff with a rate of $0.32 per kilowatt-hour guaranteed for the next 20 years. The program is modeled closely after European systems and reached its self-imposed cap of 4 MW in minutes after accepting applications. In comparison, the U.S. Department of Energy took over three years to award the first loan guarantee for solar after the Energy Policy Act passage in 2005.

Perhaps similar to the problems in using European benchmarks in the current U.S. healthcare debate, FITs are still seen by some as some strange, exotic policy not applicable to the U.S. market. Some observers have even claimed that that the type of incentives does not matter, just the amount. One solar lobbyist even said about Germany, “They’ve been handing out bags of money and calling it a feed-in tariff. People think that they want a feed-in tariff, but what they really want is those bags of money.”

“A lot of the charm of the feed-in tariff is solid, take-it-to-the-bank security and confidence for the investing community,” said U.S. Representative Jay Inslee (D-Wash), a sponsor of legislation that would establish a nationwide FIT. His bill was introduced in Congress last year and would use FITs to incent small projects up to 20 MW and help streamline grid interconnections.

An analysis by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) also confirmed that countries with feed-in tariffs have cheaper renewable electricity than those with renewable energy credits, the mechanism behind RPS. The tariff system is less risky, and investors are willing to accept lower profits for long-term stability, according to the report.

“We deal with data and the evidence is very clear,” said Toby Couture, a researcher with the NREL in a report by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune (March 22, 2009). “Feed-in tariffs have consistently proven to be cheaper for consumers. That’s the bottom line.”

Increasingly, FITs are seen as complimentary to well-crafted RPS policies. One report concluded, “RPS policies appear to be converging with some of the design characteristics typically associated with feed-in tariffs. As a result, it could become increasingly possible to incorporate elements of feed-in tariffs into RPS policy making,” (Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Energy in the USA – a Policy Update, May 2008). A similar conclusion was made in a March 2009 report by the NREL that concluded: “FIT policies…can be used in parallel and wholly separate from RPS policies, they can replace a part of the current mechanism (perhaps to support a solar carve-out, or distributed generation), or they can be used to entirely replace RPS mechanisms. Of course, they can also be used by states with voluntary renewable energy goals to advance renewable energy development (Technical Report, NREL/TP-6A2 45549 March 2009).

Despite their proven effectiveness and ability to work in conjunction with RPS policies, national, state and regional FIT legislation has been a grass roots affair, not supported by national environmental or renewable energy associations. Rhone Resch of the Solar Energy Industries Association said in January, “What you are also going to see is a focus by industry to create feed-in tariffs at the state level. Creating these programs at the state level will provide a laboratory that shows the federal government how this kind of incentive program stimulates the market. So we are probably a couple years away from a major push on feed-in tariffs at the federal level.”

Call them what you will, but feed-in tariffs or performance-based incentives need to be seriously considered by every country and every policy maker in the world looking to expand the contribution of solar energy. They will be required to reach meaningful national climate goals and achieve significant job creation and economic stimulus. Elimination or marginalization of FITs by many policy makers in the U.S. cannot be a healthy sign for optimal legislation in the future. While near-term legislative action needs to focus on winnable, achievable victories, long-term success will require effective instruments grounded in solid economics.

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The GRU feed-in tariff program has the potential to attract major new renewable energy investments and provide a vital boost to the local economy. More than 220 companies currently produce, sell or install solar PV products in Florida alone. While the program does not require that solar PV equipment be sourced from or installed by local or in-state companies, products and service providers must meet all applicable national and local standards and be licensed to operate in Florida.

Indeed, solar companies in the Gainesville area reported that the initial implementation of the feed-in tariff program was good for business. Wayne Irwin, president of Pure Energy Solar, a contractor based in the city, says the program will “grow the industry.” Mike Antheil, executive director of the Florida Alliance for Renewable Energy, agreed that investments could amount to as much as $50 million in the long run. However, because preference for local solar companies was not written into the program, it may also attract solar companies from out-of-state who aim to capitalize on the expected growth.

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The Gainesville City Commission made some important changes yesterday to improve the popular FIT program in Gainesville.

Gainesvilles-solar-feed-in-tariff-is-now-booked-until-2016

At the start of the 20^th century, the city of Gainesville, Fla., installed modern municipal water, electricity and sewer systems, which made it an attractive location for the University of Florida and helped it become a major educational and cultural hub in the state. Now, more than 100 years later, Gainesville is once again taking bold steps, this time to become a clean energy pioneer in the United States.

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Gainesville, Fla. is the first city in the country to adopt a new solar incentive program, making it profitable for an average person or business to put up solar panels and begin feeding power back to the grid. Jennifer Collins reports….

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