OREP's Achievements

In January 2009 OREP drafted “A Feed-In Tariff Act for the State of Oregon” designed to apply Feed-In Tariffs to the production of renewable energy from many sources. The bill was introduced into the 2009 session along with two other FIT proposals. Deliberations resulted in the passage of House Bill 3039, Oregon’s first Feed-In Tariff legislation, in July 2009. 

The bill creates a five-year pilot program to evaluate the effectiveness of using “volumetric incentive payments” to retail electricity customers to produce 25MW of solar energy and to compare this to using Oregon’s existing “tax incentive plus cash payment” programs for solar. The pilot program is set to launch on April 1, 2010.

OREP successfully inserted language making Oregon’s Feed-In Tariff bill the first in the U.S. to specifically set aside capacity for smaller-scale projects. We also saved Oregon taxpayers $37 million by removing a Business Energy Tax Credit provision from the bill.

We are now actively involved in the Oregon Public Utility Commission’s public process to write the Administrative Rule and Order that will implement Oregon’s Feed-In Tariff pilot program for solar

• OREP Progress Report, 2012 (01/31/2013)
• OREP Progress Report, 2009-2010 (02/22/2011)