New Program Will Make D.C. A Leader On Renewable Energy

The nation’s capital will get half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2032, officials announced Monday.

The new, 50 percent renewable portfolio standard will require the District’s utilities to increase electricity from sources such as wind and solar from the current goal of 20 percent by 2020 to 50 percent by 2032, getting at least 5 percent from solar. In addition, under a jobs and installation program, more than 100,000 low-income D.C. households will be outfitted with solar over the next 16 years.

Three State Legislators Want To Kill Michigan’s Popular Clean Energy Law

Three state legislators in Michigan have put together a bill to kill the state’s renewable energy mandate, while their colleagues have already moved on to planning the second phase after it meets its current goal.

Michigan State Rep. Tom McMillin (R), introduced a bill on October 1 that would repeal the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS), Midwest Energy News reported on Tuesday. Passed in 2008, the RPS stipulates that 10 percent of Michigan’s energy come from renewable sources by 2015.

Idaho utilities seek ownership of renewable energy credits

A bill that would require renewable energy credits to go to public utilities was introduced in the Senate State Affairs Committee Wednesday.

Idaho Power Co., Avista and Rocky Mountain Power Co are pushing the legislation, which would shift the ownership of the credits worth in some cases millions, from the power producers to the utilities who are required to buy the power under the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act — PURPA.

Vermont: Committee starts over on renewable power bill

Legislation that would require utilities to purchase green energy will go back to the drawing board, according the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and Energy.

The bill, H.468, would have required utilities to purchase 80 percent of their power from qualifying renewable sources in 2025.

The bill set out ambitious goals for utilities, but after weeks of testimony, the second draft eased these qualifications by requiring 75 percent renewables by 2032. Thirty-five percent of those would have to come from “new” generation that came online after Dec. 31, 2004.

CA: CPUC Issues Final Decision on Renewables Portfolio Standard Content Categories of SB 2X

On Dec. 15, the California Public Utilities Commission passed a highly technical and complex decision implementing portfolio content categories for the Renewables Portfolio Standard (“RPS”) program (“Final RPS Decision”). With a few exceptions, the Final RPS Decision closely mirrors the Proposed Decision which was issued on Oct. 7, 2011 and reported on in detail in an earlier advisory. Our earlier advisory also provides a good primer on the portfolio content categories for those who have not been following the RPS rulemaking (R.11-05-005).

This advisory describes the differences between the Proposed Decision and the Final RPS Decision, and discusses where the RPS rulemaking goes from here and how that might impact the energy industry.

Climate policy initiative finds long-term, stable policy support key to reducing cost of financing renewable energy projects

Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs), Feed-in-Premia (FiPs), and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) met through long-term power or premium contracts, lowered financing costs in case studies

Climate Policy Initiative (CPI)'s analysis of six large-scale renewable projects in the United States and Europe found that policies can deliver the largest reductions in project financing costs by providing long-term revenue support, offering revenue certainty, and reducing investor perceptions of risk. CPI identified specific ways in which policies affected the cost of finance for these projects and estimated the size of these effects by modeling a range of policy scenarios for each project. The analysis found that: