“The Senate bill should serve as the PTC/ITC blueprint for the final bill…. [Such reform] is an important step, but only first step, toward a level-playing-field between electrical energies that will, longer term, improve grid reliability coast-to-coast, border-to-border.”
After 25-years of subsidy-driven financing, the wind industry is entirely reliant on tax-equity investors, willing to accept tax credits in return for funding a significant percentage of their project costs. Tax equity now accounts for up to 60% of the capital needed to construct a typical wind facility. The pool of investors with enough passive income to qualify for wind PTCs is limited and includes the largest financial institutions such as JP Morgan, Bank of American, Citi and even Google.
Said bluntly, Main Street Americans are coughing up billions annually to help the richest Wall Street bankers avoid paying their taxes.…
Continue Reading… Continue Reading“… we don’t have a first-principles theory that tells us what we have to get right in order to have an accurate projection [of anthropogenic climate change]…. This is sort of an emergent knowledge base. So, that’s the translation of this last statement, ‘To date, a set of diagnostics and performance metrics that can strongly reduce uncertainties in global climate sensitivity,’ a la projections, ‘has yet to be identified’.” (p. 89)
“… if the [temperature] hiatus is still going on as of the sixth IPCC report, that report is going to have a large burden on its shoulders walking in the door, because recent literature has shown that the chances of having a hiatus 18 of 20 years are vanishingly small.” (p. 92)
– William Collins, Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“At the end of the day, it seems that smaller markets are clustered at the higher end of the EV penetration ranking. This suggests it will be much more difficult to mandate and effect massive vehicle fleet shifts in favor of EVs in much larger markets without significant government subsidies and/or mandates, as well as significant infrastructure investment in EV charging facilities.”
“Tesla had about 80% of the EV market in Hong Kong. The cessation of the subsidy in April has raised the cost of Tesla cars by between 50% and 80%. Will Hong Kong’s EV penetration rate follow the others who have ended subsidies, and fall?”
The US Congress is hammering out the details of tax reform proposals from the House and Senate. At risk is a continuation of the subsidies for clean energy investments—investments in new wind turbines and solar panels, along with the subsidies for electric vehicle (EV) purchases.…
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