While China is moving away from subsidies for new projects, the delayed payments are weighing on developers and restricting their ability to borrow more money to fund new generation. The issue is of particular importance because of the huge amounts of money pouring into the sector in China -- $818 billion in the last decade, more than double any other country, according to BloombergNEF.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia

The feed-in-tariff needs to reflect the extraordinarily high costs faced by Greater Changhua 1 and 2a, mainly related to creating a local supply chain at scale, reinforcing the onshore grid infrastructure and building, operating and maintaining offshore wind farms in challenging waters where typhoons and earthquakes occur.

Taxes & Subsidies Offshore Wind Asia

The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday cut the preliminary feed-in tariff for offshore wind energy developers over the next 20 years by 12.7 percent due to falling installation costs, dealing a blow to developers that were expecting it to remain the same.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia

Panchayat secretary Nithin Kailas told The Hindu that all the windmill towers had been installed without permission from the local body. No tax was paid to the government since they were set up. As per rules, each wind power generating unit had to pay Rs.70,000 as annual tax. As each unit occupied 120 sq m, they would have to pay land tax too.

Taxes & Subsidies Legal Asia

Two years after a new feed-in tariff system for alternative energy went into effect, we discover that the promised power revolution looks more like an evolution

Taxes & Subsidies Energy Policy Asia

High costs are one of the largest impediments to a wider uptake of clean energy in Japan following the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear meltdown ...Japan's costs threaten to detract from government policy offering financial incentives to sellers of clean energy.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia

According to various reports these incentives were scrapped as many developers took incentives to save tax and after the completion of incentives either neglected or abandoned the wind farms altogether.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia

The measures state that when power grids would otherwise refrain from usage of wind power due to peak shaving or grid restraints, thermal power companies participating in the replacement transactions will reduce their power generation levels. This will enable wind power companies to pick up the slack.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia

The United States announced preliminary duties from 13.74 percent to 26 percent on Wednesday against wind-turbine towers imported from China, a move that will heighten tension over trade of clean-energy technologies between the economic powers.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia USA

At Katana Summit, Kevin L. Strudthoff, the president and chief executive, said that his industry's problem was probably similar to the situation of the domestic solar panel industry. In fact, the American wind industry is also subsidized, mostly through a production tax credit, but by all accounts the scale of Chinese subsidies is far larger.

Taxes & Subsidies Impact on Economy Asia USA

In interviews, executives at top Chinese and foreign wind companies said many Chinese turbine makers would be squeezed out by the slowdown. One European turbine maker executive, who did not wish to be named, said the Chinese market was facing a "bloodbath".

Taxes & Subsidies Energy Policy Asia USA

Wind-energy advocates fear a recent decision by an international board overseeing the U.N. Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) may have dealt a devastating blow to China's CDM process. Others worry that the damage inflicted by a CDM executive board decision March 26 in Bonn may stretch beyond China, perhaps upsetting the entire global carbon-credits exchange market.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia

News that $450 million in federal stimulus money might go toward installing Chinese-made wind turbines in Texas prompted criticism on Thursday, with Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, calling on the Obama administration to deny federal financing. According to partners in the deal, the proposed 600-megawatt wind farm, announced late last week, would be built on 36,000 acres in West Texas using 240 wind turbines manufactured by A-Power Energy Generation Systems of Shenyang, China.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia USA Texas

Lobbyist pressure will not weigh on a U.N. panel's decision whether to award carbon finance worth about 100 million euros ($144 million) to Chinese wind power projects, said the chair of the panel on Tuesday. ...The issue has caused long-running tension between the panel and project developers and brokers about the speed of approvals in the $6.5 billion global carbon offset market. Under the U.N.-led Kyoto Protocol's clean development mechanism, rich countries can buy rights to pollute by funding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in developing nations.

Taxes & Subsidies Asia Europe

Policymakers have settled on 'emissions trading' as their favorite global-warming fix. But it isn't working. March 12, 2007 issue - Global warming isn't the only debate that may be over. Governments and policymakers around the world also seem to have settled on a solution. "A responsible approach to solving this crisis," Al Gore said recently at New York University's Law School, would be "to authorize the trading of emissions ... globally." Emissions trading, also called carbon trading, is being expanded in the European Union and Japan. And in many places where it's yet to take hold, like Sacramento, Sydney and Beijing, politicians are embracing it. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and Europe's foremost political expert on global warming, predicts that the value of carbon credits in circulation, now about $28 billion, will climb to $40 billion by 2010. This should be great news for the environment, but many experts have their doubts. The notion that emissions trading is going to make a significant dent in global warming is deeply flawed, they say. Current emissions-trading schemes have proved to be little more than a shell game, allowing polluters in the developed world to shift the burden of making cuts onto factories in the developing world.

Taxes & Subsidies Energy Policy General Asia Australia / New Zealand Europe USA

Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, governments around the world have paid plenty of lip service to renewable energies such as wind and solar power. But only a few governments have been able to engineer policies that have begun to bring alternative energies into wider use. Renewable fuels provided 18% of the world’s total electricity supply in 2004, according to figures from the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization. Almost all of that, though, came from hydropower, a source with limited growth potential because of geographic constraints. The use of wind and solar power is growing, but they still generated only 1% of global electricity production in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available.

Taxes & Subsidies Energy Policy General Asia Europe USA Denmark Germany

As part of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the government is considering whether to introduce higher mandatory targets for renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar power, for the country’s utilities in fiscal 2011-14. The obligatory use of new sources of energy is in line with the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) program outlined in the Special Measures Law Concerning the Use of New Energy by Electric Utilities–known as the RPS Law–which came into effect in fiscal 2003. The law obliges utilities to rely on five kinds of renewable energy–wind, low-head microhydraulic, biomass, solar and geothermal power–for more than 1.35 percent of their electricity by fiscal 2010, or 12.2 billion kilowatt-hours of what they sell nationwide. But, given the technical challenges to achieving the target quickly, power companies have been given a transitional allowance to gradually meet the target by fiscal 2010, beginning from 0.39 percent in fiscal 2003. The mandatory level for fiscal 2006 is 0.52 percent.

Taxes & Subsidies Energy Policy General Asia

A fund to promote green energy such as wind and solar power is losing contributors because of waning public interest. The electricity industry set up the fund in October 2000 to subsidize the expansion of costly renewable energy.

Taxes & Subsidies General Asia

Carbon offset schemes are designed to neutralise the effects of the carbon dioxide our activities produce by investing in projects that cut emissions elsewhere. They work through the rapidly growing trade in carbon credits, each worth the equivalent of a tonne of carbon. Offset companies typically buy carbon credits from projects that plant trees or encourage a switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy. They sell credits to individuals and companies who want to go "carbon neutral". Some climate experts say offsets are dangerous because they dissuade people from changing their behaviour.

Taxes & Subsidies General Asia Australia / New Zealand Europe Canada USA

Green consumers and businesses who want to neutralise their carbon emissions face being ripped off by unscrupulous operators who exploit the growing market in carbon offset schemes, a Guardian investigation has revealed. The surge in interest in such schemes, which invest millions of pounds in forestry and clean energy projects in the developing world, has created a lucrative market in carbon, which is unregulated and subject to little scrutiny. Campaigners and analysts say independent standards are urgently needed to protect consumers and to ensure the promised carbon savings are delivered. Francis Sullivan, a carbon offset expert who led attempts by banking group HSBC to neutralise its emissions, said: “There will be individuals and companies out there who think they’re doing the right thing but they’re not. I am sure that people are buying offsets in this unregulated market that are not credible. I am sure there are people buying nothing more than hot air.”

Taxes & Subsidies General Asia Australia / New Zealand Europe Canada USA