The Finance Committee of the City of Palo Alto will take up their feed-in tariff proposal on Feb 7. They’ve filled in a few details–most importantly, the price. They propose 13.1 cents/kWh for 20 year contracts. It’s a value-based FIT; they got to that number by valuing both the avoided cost of new brown power, and by valuing transmission and distribution savings.
It’s a 5 MW pilot, with a project size floor of 100 kW. Given the price of land in Palo Alto, we’d expect most projects to be rooftop. It’ll be interesting to see if the proposed price is sufficient to attract participation. SMUD’s 100 MW of FITs sold out instantly at ~14 cents/kWh–but those were for projects up to 5 MW in size. On the other hand, panel prices have come down since then.
As we’ve written before, one of the most interesting things about the proposal is how it deals with oversubscription.
We’ve sent in notes of advice and support. If you’d like to, details on the meeting here, and the proposal, here.