Alliance for Renewable Energy to Promote Feed-in Tariffs

Here's my main problem with feed-in tariffs. Who purchases solar panels, wind generators, etc? Answer: mostly people with fairly high income levels. So utilities are required to pay them excessive amounts for the electricity produced. What does the utility do? It rolls that excessive cost into the rates paid by other people who can't afford to buy solar panels, etc. Thus, you have the poor and lower middle class subsidizing the higher income people. TOO REGRESSIVE!

Your point is well taken, but we cannot realistically expect people without money to pay for anything. If it is important for poor people to have renewable energy, we will have to find ways to give it to them, which again must come from taxpayers or ratepayers or some other payers than the poor who have nothing. It has been done; these are not impossible things.

Even so, the poor are going to benefit disproportionately from the improved air quality of renewable energy because they have up to now suffered disproportionately from the existing systems of production. So it's not quite the one-sided development it appears.

Wealthy neighborhoods have often crusaded to get their lines buried. This is a greater exploitation of the poor than FIT.

I support FIT, for clean-air reasons, as Jon Seehafer has mentioned above, but for other reasons as well.

Distributed energy and micro-grids are better for places where the grid is at risk of going down, e.g., old, poor neighborhoods with overhead lines.

Ideally, one guy would have a good enough roof and some spare bucks so his neighbors could party at his house if the grid fails. Who wants to eat ice cream by herself in a dark house?

Poor folks often have more health problems, making the risk of power interruption a bigger problem, especially for the working, isolated poor.

While affluent working people can go to a hotel, this isn't even going to occur to working poor. They will freeze or fry, depending on the season.

Older women tend to remain poor, but in other age and gender groups, there is more mobility than one might think.

The poor are not monolithic. One cannot tell what they would say for themselves about FIT without polling them.

Full disclosure: I made so little working part-time as a health coach in low-income housing last year that I didn't get a stimulus payment. My officially poor participants did get stimulus payments. This is a tricky demographic, when one speaks of the poor.

After I posted, above, I noticed that Oregon is not on the list of states. I am curious as to why this would be and how Oregon could get on the list.

I will sign up for track-back. I hope the authors will read and respond to these comments. Thanks.