David,

I suspect what Jerome means is that, without a feed-in tariff, wind is at the mercy of the markets, i.e. depending on economic conditions, investing in wind may seem like a really neat idea or... not at all. e.g. from about 2003 to 2007, wind was an objectively good investment, even without the guarantee of feed-in tariff, whereas currently investment is slackening because costs are higher and there are no guarantees of future electricity prices.

Of course, if "the market" had a realistic idea of future fossil fuel prices, there would be no need for feed-in tariffs, and everyone would be building wind farms.

dwalters

in previous years, banks (including mine) have been able to finance wind under almost all regulatory frameworks (tax based like the US PTC, market based green certificates, fixed price green certificates, etc... Feed-in tariff allow to avoid volume risk (the risk that you may not sell your power, or that you may have to pay some penalties as balancing costs) and price risk - these risk can be hedged in other ways: long term contracts, financial hedges, better wind prediction tools, etc... but this is more difficult in today's environment.

FIT has proved to be the easiest and cheapest, altogether, but it's not the only one that works.