Strength analysis of international Feed-in Tariff promotion of clean energy applications for greenhouse gas emission mitigation

Greenhouse gas emissions from power generations are grave concerns around the world. Clean energy technologies such as Solar Photovoltaic, Wind, etc. have been recognized as viable solutions to greenhouse gas emission mitigation. Due to the high cost of clean energy electricity, various financial incentives such as Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) are available throughout the world to promote the applications of clean energy systems to reduce the environmental footprint of power generations. In this paper, we developed a simple mathematic method to characterize and benchmark the strength of different FITs in seven selected countries including United States (US), Germany (DE), South Africa (SA), China (CH), Italy (IT), Iran (IR), and South Korea (SK). The FITs are applied on the greenhouse gas emission mitigation in the selected seven countries. The benchmarking is made on the mitigation benefits relative to the total amount of incentive input in each country. The results demonstrate that China and South Africa have the highest mitigation potential for FIT promotion of wind power, while Iran and South Africa have the highest mitigation potential for solar.