Well, as of March 5 and a unanimous vote by the Palo Alto City Council, all of those places have solar feed-in tariffs (FIT).

Palo Alto is calling their program a CLEAN program (Clean Local Energy Accessible Now) rather than what they considered the awkward term "Feed-in-Tariff" or FiT.

It's a pilot program for the City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU) — the first year is capped at 4 megawatts and meant for medium-sized commercial rooftops with a minimum size of 50 kilowatts per installation. The FIT is applicable to solar only, although other renewable energy sources could be considered later on. The city will pay $ 0.14 per kilowatt-hour for 20-year contracts.

Palo Alto is arguably the heart of Silicon Valley, home to dozens of venture capital firms and thousands of new companies armed with a startup and innovation culture fueled by its immediate neighbor, Stanford University. The city itself has about 26,000 electric meters and a peak load of approximately 180 megawatts.

The program limits itself to medium and large commercial solar rooftops in the interest of keeping workload issues to a minimum in the early stages of this endeavor.

The $ 0.14 per kilowatt-hour figure was based on the city's avoided cost. Here's the calculation:

• $ 0.070 for energy
• $ 0.034 green premium
• $ 0.006 local capacity value, essentially avoided distribution grid costs
• $ 0.019 avoided transmission access charges (TAC), an amount paid in California for every kilowatt-hour that is delivered from the transmission grid.
• $ 0.006 avoided transmission losses
• Total: $ 0.1355 per kilowatt-hour

So, the $ 0.14 per kilowatt-hour FIT price includes a $ 0.0045 premium and was agreed upon as a number that would attract developer interest. The cost of a fully subscribed program would be $ 29,000 per year; the city council estimates that the cost to the utility customer would be $ 0.01 per month. At this scale and modest cost, the city gains experience with the permitting, interconnection, metering, and billing process while developers gain experience in working with Palo Alto. (Note that Gainesville, Florida's FIT price was in the $ 0.26 to $ 0.32 range, which is good for developers, but perhaps not so good for municipalities.)

Craig Lewis, the Director of the Clean Coalition, a distributed generation advocacy group, attended the February 7 Palo Alto City Council meeting and commented that he saw this as "a good program, because it is constrained and not open to residential rooftops." He added, "It delivers the trifecta of being cost-effective, timely, and environmentally sustainable, and the pilot program is designed for success by avoiding pitfalls like dealing with tax complications of residential-level projects." 

Jon Abendschein, Palo Alto's Resource Planner, believes that $ 0.14 per kilowatt-hour is a price that will attract developers to the program.

Lewis added, "There are dozens of places around the United States developing CLEAN Programs, and Palo Alto just set the stage for this critical movement to unleash Clean Local Energy Accessible Now."

Detractors of feed-in tariffs have claimed that the prices can never be set at a proper rate and that auction mechanisms are a more equitable solution. Others have argued that having no subsidy at all is the right solution.

In the meantime, Palo Alto now has a FIT CLEAN program in place.

Go Green

Recycled Materials

Recycled building products may be considered green because they conserve resources, raw materials and turn post consumer or industrial waste into a valuable and useable resource. These benefits can be nullified however if producing the recycled product requires an undue amount of energy consumption, creates pollution or if the final product leeches toxins into the environment. Rubber tiles for instance put old tires to good use giving them green kudos but when used in an enclosed environment they’ll leak unhealthy chemicals into the air that are decidedly not green.

Conservation of Natural Resources

Building products that use less material than their predecessors, are rapidly renewable or have a high durability factor make the green list because they conserve natural resources. But like recycled products, products that conserve resources may also have qualities or histories that are notoriously not green. For example MDF board can be made from almost any quality wood including sawmill off-cuts and uses almost 100% of the wood in the final product. The result is that an MDF board makes more complete use of natural resources than a natural wood board. But if it has been pressed with urea formaldehyde, as it typically is, it will off-gas and working with it can make you sick. MDF also has a shorter life span and less water resistance than natural wood products which means it will need to be replaced sooner and require the use of even more resources.

Clean Air

Natural materials that don’t pollute the environment or leech toxins are legendary for getting green points and keeping it clean. Wood, stone, slate, marble and plant products, for example, don’t require long chains of chemical processing or release cancerous fumes into the lived environment. Natural, minimally processed materials are simply healthier to live with and therefore green. These benefits are eliminated, however, if harvesting, extracting or transporting the materials creates pollution, requires a huge amount of resources or depletes a resource faster than it can be renewed.

Energy Efficiency

Products that affect energy consumption and water use on a day to day basis stand to effect the biggest environmental impact of all materials that go into a home. Those who wish to be truly green will make sure that operating their home requires minimum amounts of energy and water. Properly insulated walls, windows and doors minimize the amount of energy required to heat and cool a building and therefore have a favorable impact on the environment and are fortunately fairly easy to attain. But how will you generate heat and power? Unfortunately, most of us will have to opt for some sort of fossil fuel or electric power limiting our “green” energy options to those that focus on using as few resources as possible rather than renewable resources like solar power and wind power that don’t need to be mined or transported and create no pollution.

Clearly, it’s not easy being green. Though making strides toward reducing our impact on the environment by building and buying green homes is clearly one of the best places to start, it’s important to educate ourselves if we want to do it right. Green isn’t just something we buy, it’s a careful balance between conservation, low pollution and sustainability.