SMUD Offers Unusual Feed-in Tariff; But Not as Good as Gainesville's
The limit of 1.5 MW on project size in the California FIT has hampered development, cutting into the economies of scale needed. The SMUD program makes no differentiation between technologies, size, application, or resource intensity, but does pay more for greener power.
SMUD FIT summary:
Program Cap: 100 MW
Project Cap: 5 MW
Contract Terms: 10, 15, 20 years
Time Differentiated Tariffs
No Technology Differentiation
Tariffs based on avoided cost, value-based tariffs
Effective January, 2010
Applications available November, 2009
Includes tariffs for Combined Heat & Power
SMUD is trying to move the policy needle in California, according to Craig Lewis, a founding member of the California FIT Coalition. “The fact that SMUD raised the project size limit to 5MW is indicative that they believe distributed generation projects can be seamlessly integrated into the distribution grid in California,” says Lewis.
SMUD’s much larger target:
With an overall ceiling of 100 MW and project limits up to 5 MW; SMUD’s ambitious program scales to a statewide equivalent of roughly 3,000 MW – providing an informative example for the California legislature and the PUC. Currently California’s FIT for 36 million customers is under 500 MW. SMUD serves only 1.4 million but offers a program ceiling of 100 MW.
In a recent NREL analysis of the both the new SMUD and California feed-in tariff, Toby Couture of E3Analytics cites the uncertainty of financial return relative to European FIT policy design.
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