(Feed in Tariffs – FITs – are a system of fixed prices for renewable energy paid to the generator by the ‘grid company’. The fixed price is above the ‘market’ price and hence provides financial support to enable more renewable capacity to be built.)

So what’s wrong with Feed in Tariffs?

Well, actually nothing. It’s a good way to financially support renewable technologies and so encourage their wider use. It’s worked brilliantly in Germany.

But do they have anything to offer the UK? That’s a different question altogether and my answer to that is a definite no. The reasons are simple enough -

Feed in Tariffs are the right answer to the wrong question.

The UK RO (Renewables Obligation) scheme does the same job. It provides support above that which the ‘market’ alone would give.

FITs work well, so does the RO. The RO is not the problem, so swapping it for FITs won’t achieve anything.

The dominant renewable technology in the UK is on shore wind – it’s technically mature, in mass production and it’s economic. We have enough of it to power the whole country several times over (we have 40% of Europe’s wind resource), and it’s expected to deliver the lion’s share of our renewable targets.

Does it need additional financial support? No, it does not. The government only recently resisted the temptation to reduce the support that wind currently gets through the RO – the trend here is reduced support not increased, because wind clearly has what it needs.

The one thing preventing the UK from having a massive contribution to energy needs from our wind resource is the planning system. And FITs won’t and can’t fix that. Feed in Tariffs are about financial support and that is not the problem. It’s really that simple.

There are technologies other than wind of course, like wave power for example, and they need more support (money) to work than wind does, but they are getting this through the existing RO mechanism – which is now giving multiple ROCs (Renewable Obligation Certificates) to certain technologies, like wave and tidal power. It’s as effective as feed in tariffs at this job.

Feed in Tariffs were a great idea 15 years ago and would have helped the UK then, but we finally got our act together with the RO some years ago (it’s our Feed in Tariff by another name) – and our problems today are not money, they are planning – only planning. Let’s discuss instead adopting German planning laws – now there’s an idea David….

You can now see part two in this series on Feed-in Tariffs here.

We talked about the 1,000 homes the turbine can power every year and other bits and pieces, how often it doesn’t work (mere days per year) how much time we spend on maintenance (two days per year), that kind of stuff – a brief exploration of the myths of wind energy I guess. The lack of noise was one thing he remarked on, from the turbine I mean, the M4 is just awful there.

I took him into the machine itself – followed every step of the way by photographers and film crews and I could see he was so very used to that, his face and his body language were always just right (not like mine). This is no criticism just an observation, he’s always on camera after all. Hey maybe I should have had a shave…. Nah.

We talked briefly about the Tories idea to introduce Feed-in Tariffs to the UK – as an answer to the lack of Renewable Energy progress we’re all making. It’s the second time this week I’ve been asked how I think this might work (or not), the Guardian also asked, so I’m going to write a short piece on it – and blog it.

Basically I think it’s the right answer to the wrong question, but more later.

I mentioned (I just had to), more than once but always in context… , that planning was actually the only real problem for onshore wind – the only thing standing in the way of us hitting our targets. And I pointed out the anomaly that wind is the only major generating source whose planning decisions are made by District Councils. Oil, Gas, Coal and Nuclear decisions are made elsewhere, with a different outcome.

It’s easy enough to see how wind got to be in that situation, the planning system being designed for bigger concentrations of power before wind came along with its decentralised smaller scale nature – but it’s hard to see why wind has been left in this situation for so long. Except for the fact that it would take guts to change the system in the face of the hysterical NIMBY mob….

Don’t think I made any headway with that one – no politicians in the UK have the guts to tackle it in my opinion, but I don’t stop trying.

On Feed in Tariffs though, I detected an interest in what I had to say. Hope so it would be a bad policy for us all – you can read more on why in this post.

Anyway, nice enough half hour spent with the man that might be our next prime minister. I quite liked him.