Japan panel to set solar power fee at 51 cents/kwh -Nikkei

[kristopher]

3. You would have absolutely nothing to say if you had to stick to the truth

You know very well that the reduction in FITs is a proper adjustment to the program made to keep the reimbursement level to the system owners constant in the face of declining system installation costs.

Far from being a sign of any sort of failure it is a sign that the subsidy is working.

Germany Installed 3 GW of Solar PV in December — The U.S. Installed 1.7 GW in All of 2011
By Stephen Lacey on Jan 10, 2012 at 3:47 pm

And the Germans did it at roughly half the price.

In the lead up to another 15% reduction in Germany’s feed-in tariff (the price paid for solar electricity fed into the grid), the German solar industry finished 2011 off with a bang — installing 3,000 megawatts of solar photovoltaic systems in December.

Let’s put those figures in perspective: In just one month, Germany installed almost twice as many megawatts of solar than the entire U.S. developed during all of 2011. Preliminary figures show Germany ended the year with roughly 7,500 MW of installations; the U.S. ended up with about 1,700 megawatts, according to GTM Research.

Oh, and I should probably mention that the Germans installed all of that solar at almost half the price. The average price of an installed solar system in Germany came to $2.80 in the third quarter of 2011. In the U.S., it was about $5.20 in the third quarter.

Why the disparity? The Germans have a much more mature solar market. The country’s simple, long-term feed-in tariff makes financing projects less expensive, and has created a sophisticated supply chain that allows companies to source product, generate leads and get systems on rooftops efficiently.

Some criticize feed-in tariffs for not creating a “market” like we imagine in the U.S....

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/01/10/401882/germany-installed-2-gw-of-solar-pv-in-the-month-of-december/