Genius of FIT and MicroFIT is that it is NOT a tax payer subsidy while in fact requires investors to put up the large amounts of up-front capital, NOT the tax payer.
Detail
Feed-in Tariff (FIT) creates a solution to implementing renewable energy systems that ultimately are the lowest cost way of providing energy for society.
They are NOT a taxpayer subsidy. They are paid for by the energy rate payers on their energy bills. If you use less then you pay less giving you some control over the cost. In general the added cost of renewables is an additional 1 cent per kilowatt hour. Most of us could easily reduce our consumption by an amount equivalent to 1 cent per kilowatt hour in order to offset the costs of implementing renewable energy.
Energy rate payers can offset any additional costs by investing in the FIT or MicroFIT program quite easily paying for the additional cost. By getting a loan to implement a system, anybody on the grid can instantly be cash flow positive even when borrowing 100% of the required capital, providing income that can offset any additional electricity costs related to the FIT and MicroFIT.
Unlike coal, nuclear, gas and oil where the tax payer typically invests up-front the large capital required to build plants, FIT and MicroFIT require that the investor provide the capital so that the government (us tax payers) don't have to come up with the capital. Instead we promise to pay the FIT/MicroFIT rates for twenty years based on reasonable expectations for what the energy costs to implement, allowing for a reasonable return and if environmental benefits were included, we would see a massive return-on-investment, rather than the reasonable one assessed based on conventional economic theory which treats degradation to the environment as an externality.
After the twenty year contract it is of benefit to both the tax payer (you and me) and the energy systems providers to have these renewable energy systems still on the grid providing a substantial amount of renewable energy for another twenty years.
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