80% of the solar in the world was installed through feed-in tariffs as incentives. That's how Germany became a world leader in solar. Feed-in tariffs would encourage more rooftop solar and parking lot solar. Instead the feds are incentivizing industrial-scale desert solar and wind projects that are terribly destructive to the environment.

I've attended several high level seminars on renewable energy and solar in the past 2 weeks and heard all sides of the arguments from prominent experts. The truth is that solar is now at parity with fossil fuels in CA thanks to various incentives that fostered innovation and boosted demand. But we could go miles further with feed in tariffs.

Jim Powell, one of the experts who spoke, has calculated that it would actually be both cheaper and faster to subsidize rooftop/parking lot solar than wind and solar industrial-scale projects. The only reason this isn't being done is corruption, basically the big energy companies control Congress and the key federal agencies that make these decisions. Just like the oil and coal subsidies, wind and industrial solar subsidies are bad ideas. We should be subsidizing you and I to put solar on our homes and businesses and sell it back to the grid. This also would mean no need for miles of powerlines despoiling the landscape to connect up to all those remote projects.

One of the conferences I went to this week was sponsored by several Indian tribes that are heartsick over the destruction of artifacts and sacred sites proposed by monster-scale projects. Our government has broken every law for negotiating with the tribes in the rush to build these phony "green" projects that are anything but. How is devastating tribes, local communities, and killing eagles with wind turbines "green"? If that were the only way to stop global warming, that would be one thing. But rooftop solar is cheaper and faster, creates more jobs and keeps them local, and without the destruction of the environment, public lands and cultural resources.

I called the 4 companies that are accepted by my power company. 1 (one) returned my call and never showed up for the survey.
On the other hand, when I called the president of my beloved HOA, I was told that " no can do", it will violate the rules of the association and will decrease the value of the properties on the street with an "eye sore".
A friend of mine fought with his HOA and it cost him $2500 in attorney fees to get them to see the light.
A small solar system on every roof will be much more cost-efficient and easy to implement than huge solar or wind farms covering acres of land.

This article doesn't seem to mention that the profitability problem with say the German solar industry is due to much cheaper panels coming from China, rather than declining subsidies.

The real subsidies are probably staying close to the same, because the costs of solar panels have collapsed. Right now there is massive global overcapacity in solar, and the manufacturers will continue to consolidate for some time. The price you can get for most solar panels is below the cost of producing them.

Germany is in no sense abandoning its commitment to expand renewables - it has just changed its focus to building offshore wind, plus the infrastructure to shunt the power where it is needed. Right now there are some areas in Germany that are flooded with excess electricity when the sun is out and the wind is blowing, so Germany wants to spend more money building the transmission lines than paying for power sources it cannot deploy.

While German companies were manufacturing the solar panels being installed, the Germans were, in effect, willing to pay a premium to support the industry. After that collapsed, and after the grid got somewhat flooded, the obvious costs in relation to minimal extra benefits changed the equation.

The Chinese seem to be backing away from the solar build-up somewhat as well - they used government funds to build overcapacity and now they are going to take significant losses. They too are changing their energy policy:
http://wallstreetsectorselector.com/2012/01/overcapacity-threatens-china%E2%80%99s-solar-energy-sector-with-mixed-implications-fxi-tan-ewg-chie-fan-gex/
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1102&MainCatID=&id=20120220000095
http://english.people.com.cn/102774/7759827.html

Germany is not particularly favorable territory for solar power, so it is getting relatively much less bang for the Euro from these subsidies, and over-investing in solar will prevent it from having the funds to build the grid infrastructure to utilize the wind farms they have planned:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,809529,00.html
Until the Germans can build at least the north-south transmission facilities, they will go on damaging their economy:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,816669,00.html

Put them on all public buildings and make it part of the RFP (request for proposal) that panels must be produced in the US.

It's not the total answer, of course; maybe some import tariffs to jack up the cost of those Chinese panels to parity with American made ones would spur the private sector to stop buying Chinese products.