Feed-in tariffs with minimum price guarantees and regulatory uncertainty

The feed-in tariff (FIT) program is a popular policy for incentivizing new renewable energy projects because it establishes a long-term contract with renewable energy investors. This paper presents a novel model to analyze a FIT contract with a minimum price guarantee (i.e., a price-floor regime) from an investor's perspective. The results show that a perpetual guarantee only induces investment for prices below the price floor when offering a risk-free investment opportunity. In contrast, the finite guarantee may induce investment even when the revenue from the guarantee is lower than the investment cost. When an investor faces a scenario with regulatory uncertainty, a higher and more likely reduction in the price floor induces earlier investment. For all cases, investors postpone an investment decision when market conditions present a higher price volatility. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The authors gratefully acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for the many useful suggestions that greatly improved this article. This work was supported by a PhD scholarship provided by Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) through the MIT Portugal program under project SFRH/BD/52086/2013, and was supported by national funds through Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2013. In addition, this work was carried out within the funding with COMPETE reference no POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006683 (UID/ECO/03182/2013), with the FCT/MEC's (Fundacao para a Cincia e a Tecnologia, I.P.) financial support through national funding and by the ERDF through the Operational Programme on "Competitiveness and Internationalization - COMPETE 2020" under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement.