Why Not Ohio? Feed-In Tariffs Would Bring Green Energy Jobs To The State

[Rick Rowlands]

No argument with you there.  Feed in tariffs should be implemented in Ohio.   Still not enough reason to vote for you though.

[irishbobcat]

Why Not Ohio? Feed-In Tariffs Would Bring Green Energy Jobs To The State

Paul Gipe wrote last week on how feed-in tariffs would boost renewable energy in the states as well as bring new green jobs:

Something is up when both liberal and conservative think tanks find something to like in the same obscure energy policy with an odd name: feed-in tariffs.

Politicians take notice when the conservative Hoover Institution joins the liberal Center for American Progress in saying that it's time for the United States to consider a policy that pays farmers, homeowners and businesses for the electricity produced by their wind turbines and solar panels.

It's not surprising that Americans from right to left find feed-in tariffs appealing. After all, it's an American idea born three decades ago when the United States last faced an energy crisis. What's more American than unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit to provide a needed product such as electricity?

A feed-in tariff is a premium paid by a utility for power generated by solar or wind power to encourage the development of renewable energy sources.

Unfortunately, the principle languished here when oil prices collapsed in the early 1980s. In the meantime, other nations picked it up, refined it and now are using it to drive industrial development and create new jobs.

"Feed-in tariffs are the most widely used renewable energy policy in the world," says a massive report by a team of researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. According to its study, feed-in tariffs are responsible for 75 percent of all solar photovoltaic and 45 percent of all wind development worldwide.

Germany has become a renewable energy powerhouse through feed-in tariffs, creating 300,000 new jobs since the program was launched a decade ago. In the first three months of 2010 alone, German homeowners, farmers and small businesses installed 30,000 new solar photovoltaic systems. By July 2010, German homeowners alone installed more solar systems than all the projected 2010 solar photovoltaic installations in the United States. German farmers will have installed even more. In the first six months of this year, Germany installed twice the total solar photovoltaic systems installed in the United States during the last 20 years.

Ohio needs a Governor to push feed-in tariffs through the statehouse.

We need a Green Governor to help truely start the ball rolling on converting solar and wind power to good use here in the Buckeye state. We need a Green Governor who will use this new green energy to bring jobs back to Ohio.

Dennis S. Spisak-Green Party of Ohio Nominee for Governor

www.votespisak.org/governor/

www.dennisspisak.com

for more info, contact 330-503-1407