Maintaining a Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program is a good idea, even if the system has some weak points as of now. The main idea behind FIT is to encourage the development of more energy through renewable sources such as wind, hydro, and solar. That is the upside. The downside, which is the weak point right now, is that the funds to enable FIT come from additional fees that are collected from electricity consumers.
Because of the existing source of funds, it has in effect become a damn if you do, damn if you don’t situation. That is so because electricity consumers are happy when FIT collections are suspended because their electricity costs go lower in the short run, but actually, they should be unhappy because it will eventually make their electricity costs go higher in the future if and when renewable energy sources are not developed.
I think that the solution to this problem is plain and simple. Instead of getting the money from the electricity consumers, the government should just allocate more funds for this purpose through the General Appropriations Act (GAA), perhaps giving the additional budgets to the DOE.
I think that Congress should do some pencil pushing so that they could discover through macroeconomic analysis that the economy could benefit more in the long run if renewable energy development had its own funding source rather than getting it due to some kind of penalty clause. This is a cost-and-benefit analysis.
