“I’ll be honest. It’s probably not something that’s going to happen in the near term.”

So pronounced Dian Grueneich, one of California’s five public utilities commissioners, today about the prospects of a German-style feed-in tariff to accelerate solar adoption in the United States.

Attendees of the 3rd Germany California Solar Day, held at the San Francisco headquarters of local utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), had been buoyed by chart after chart from presentations showing skyrocketing German solar industry growth after the introduction of its EEG (feed-in tariff law) in 2003.

So it seemed only reasonable to ask what prevented the U.S. from instituting something similar.

In response, presenters essentially said it was too late, and that there was too much momentum for California-style incentives.

“I personally would love to see it happen. But it would be a huge political fight. We’ve worked for years already just to get to where we are,” said David Hochschild of PV Now, a lobby group for a consortium of leading photovoltaic solar vendors.

“From my perspective, it would be a mistake to revamp the program we’ve got in California. It already took three years to get through the legislature.”

Lobbyist David Hochschild lobbies the crowd (photo). >>

“For us to change the structure that we now have in place, we’d have to see a very strong collective effort made by the solar industry and consumers. We do have this process in place and will probably give it a try for a couple of years,” echoed California commissioner Grueneich.

California, with its California Solar Initiative passed last year, offers the most progressive incentive programs in the U.S. to encourage adoption of solar photovoltaics. Yet the initiative was assailed repeatedly through the day by conference-goers.

The financial burden for subsidies, such as those in California, falls upon taxpayers. With feed-in tariffs such as those in Germany, the extra cost is distributed across utilities’ customer bases. Payments reward overproduction of power, and reward the number of kilowatt hours produced over a long period of time.

There was acute pain at the conference on the topic of feeding power back into the grid. While PG&E lets solar installations send power back to the utility, solar installers complained that, unlike in Germany, PG&E customers only earn credit up to the amount of their electrical bill for the year, and no more.

Greg Kennedy, general manager of solar installer Occidental Power in San Francisco, said his customers wanted to generate more power than they use and run their systems at a net profit.

“Even paying just a few cents per kilowatt hour, the avoided rate cost, would give them incentive to send power to the grid. Even just a minimum effort could make a dramatic change in the industry,” he said.

David Rubin, Director of Service Analysis for PG&E, asserted that buying power from solar customers wouldn’t be cost-effective, or fair to other customers, and would be complicated to administer.

“We would agree that a feed-in tariff would be a lot simpler. We are open to discussing that. But there are other players in the overall fabric of the California solar initiative. We’re not the only voice,” he said.

Rubin’s response, and those from other speakers, failed to satisfy attendees, who loudly applauded every time a feed in-related question was raised.

“It’s puzzling to me that the U.S. federal and state governments are as far behind the Germans as they are,” Alex Krem, managing director of Alameda Capital, told Cleantech.com. “I’m surprised at the approach we’re taking. It’s almost as if we’re still stuck in the old monopolistic thinking, that there’s one provider of power: you like it or lump it. Why wouldn’t our policy makers push hard to adopt the same system?”

In the four years since Germany introduced its program, its solar market has grown to become more than six times that of the U.S.

Today’s Germany California Solar Day event in San Francisco was organized by the German American Chamber of Commerce and other business and government groups intent on fostering interaction between the two countries.