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DoDo:
The article has a breakdown of the planned rates. Most run for 20 years. Rates for solar encourage larger plants: the rate is uniform (and rather generous at c. 0.42/kWh), but plants under 10 kW get it for ten years only. OTOH rates for wind encourage small-scale wind: while the c. 0.23/kWh rate for large wind is generous, sub-20-kW turbines get two and a half times that much! No differentation for off-shore. Minihydro rates are also generous, and favour smaller plants (three levels set between the lower wind and the solar rate). I suspect geothermal rates aren't that generous: the higher one, for sub-15-MW plants, is set to the same level as solar. There is biomass, too. The high rates are explicitly aimed at creating a boom in the first three years. However, there is no word about the method of degression thereafter.
The article has a breakdown of the planned rates. Most run for 20 years.
I wonder what details if any changed; the linked article has few details.
Quibbling: for an industry site, washing together output and capacity is a significant mistake. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
It's as if they slipped a decimal place. What is being done elsewhere (notably in the UK, Lithuania, Bulgaria?) is incentivising wind installations of less than 500kw, which are not too inefficient, and have fairly low visual and acoustic impact. These are being rolled out (for example in in Northern Ireland), and might be a good fit for Japanese topology, as they don't require major engineering works for difficult mountainous sites. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
I wonder about the sub-500-kW units: that's not something new, that's where the average turbine was in 1997 or thereabouts. The way I understand it, the trend for the bigger the better was footed in two main reasons: the rise in hub height (stronger and less turbulent and more stable winds higher up) and less impact (visual and road and cable ditch). So sub-500-kW units would appear useful as niche fillers: off-grid supply for a consumer with low demand, sites hemmed in relatively closely by residential areas, and the mountainous sites you mention. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Having checked the then biggest markets: the least year when newly installed turbines averaged below 500 kW was 1995 in Germany and the USA, 1996 in Denmark. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
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