We broadly welcome the move towards incorporating environmental and social benefits of distributed generation into the structure of the feed-in tariff.
By excluding non-carbon-related social and environmental benefits from the structure of the tariff, the Essential Services Commission risks keeping the proposed feed-in tariff at a level that significantly under-estimates the overall benefits of distributed generation. Given that the purpose of the feed-in tariff is to incentivize the uptake of distributed generation, the more the tariff includes the value of all benefits, the better. Therefore, the ESC should allow for the inclusion of additional social and environmental if/when the government determines that there is sufficient evidence to support an estimate of the benefits.