Source:World Future Council May 2010, 18 pages

In this report, Paul Gipe analyzes how well North American Feed-in Tariffs (FiT) compare to FiT best practices from around the world. A grading system was developed to compare and analyze the different North American FiT programs. Grading criteria included factors such as program and project size caps, contract terms, eligible technologies, and different tariff rates depending on technology, generation, and size.

The results of the study indicated that North American FiT programs except for Ontario’s FiT program rank significantly lower than the European FiT programs, which were seen as being the gold standard.  The US FiT programs were hampered by low program caps, no inflation indexing, and only relatively no differentiation within types of technology.  Ontario's sophisticated FiT program, which was modeled after the European programs, lead the way receiving full points for program cap, tariff differentiation between technologies, and tariff differentiation within each technology.  

To download this report, click here.