SEMI Shows Governments the Way to PV Power
SEMI has just published what it calls one of its most important white papers, as a valuable reference for legislators on feed-in tariffs for solar energy.
Alexander E. Braun, Senior Editor -- PV Society, 12/8/2009
SEMI's PV Group made available today what it considers to be one of its most important white papers: Advancing a Sustainable Solar Future: SEMI PV Group Policy Principles and Recommended Best Practices for Solar Feed-in Tariffs. The paper is SEMI's policy paper on feed-in tariffs, and could be considered a template on this subject for legislators.
"Our membership recognized early on that we needed a role in public policy, because it is so important to the world solar energy market," said Tom Morrow, SEMI's vice president of global expositions, sales and marketing. "After a review of the market, we realized that feed-in tariffs is really the preferred policy instrument for the PV environment."
Feed-in tariff is another term for performance-based incentives. It is the framework of policies that require a power utility to purchase solar electricity at generation cost rates that will be sufficient to encourage demand. According to Morrow, fully 80% of the solar power in the world today is produced in a feed-in tariff environment, where the utilities purchase solar energy at incentive-based rates. This spurs the market to create solar energy, and impacts the entire downstream environment of installers, bankers and suppliers, who will adjust their businesses in accordance to how many — and for how much — they can sell power to.
 |
Feed-in tariffs for PV within the German feed-in tariff, based on degression rates decided on June 6, 2008. (Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, ISE) |
"There is considerable confusion in the marketplace, lots of local efforts aimed at understanding and developing policy," Morrow said. "We thought we might play a global role by assembling empirical and other policy information between two covers — a clear advocacy paper — with documentation that will be useful to policy-makers worldwide."
SEMI's white paper is not a one-size-fits-all attempt to outline policy information for various governments and jurisdictions. It is a very high-level document that fills a much-felt need. "Typical feed-in tariff policies have a number of moving parts, and we have been very adamant in making clear that this document does not reflect SEMI's position on any individual piece of legislation or policy option that may be considered or be in practice anywhere in the world," Morrow said. He added that at various government levels across the globe, there are many practical and pragmatic policy issues that take place about which there tends to be little information. "This this is an attempt to produce an all-encompassing policy best-practices paper that could reinforce what we think are the key principles in feed-in tariff policy, without getting into the weeds of local politics, because there are always going to be issues of timing and legislative strategy, and all kinds of other issues that we are not going to be informed about, that take place at a state or country level."
Morrow emphasized that SEMI exerted this effort to provide a reference work for legislators making policy by providing them with a benchmarking aid to policy-making. "We believe that with 50 references it may be the most comprehensive summary of the empirical data available on feed-in tariff policy analysis worldwide," Morrow said, adding that like other power sources, PV energy is an energy business spurred by incentives. "Fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and oil also get incentives in the way of a variety of tax breaks and other means. So this is the recommended approach to level the playing field for solar power in ways that have proven to be effective."
This is a major, important document. SEMI is looking to the Internet to carry much of the burden of distributing it by ensuring that it is Google-referenceable. It will also be distributed through SEMI's advisory board and members, and directly sent to policy-makers worldwide.
As Morrow put it, "We think that the executive summary shows the why and its components. We believe that feed-in tariffs are the most effective policy instrument available to policy-makers worldwide, for advancing PV power generation."
