Permanent Subsidy? Industrial Wind’s PTC (14 Extensions)

“But nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program,” Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in their 1983 primer, Tyranny of the Status Quo. And regarding government help for a developing business? “The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” the husband-and-wife team observed. “The so-called infants never grow up.”

Industrial wind power is certainly not an infant industry, having been demonstrated as grid electricity in the nineteenth century and again during World War II. [1] But it is dilute and intermittent, fatal qualities as against fossil-fuel generated electricity.

And so although the wind interests have claimed competitiveness (actual or impending) since the 1980s, and received a lifeline subsidy in 1992 (below), the U.S. industrial wind industry is as dependent on government largesse as ever. The summary below lists the 14 extensions of the Production Tax Credit for documentation.

PTC Creation & Extensions (reverse order)

• Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (P.L. 117–169), extending the PTC through 2025 at $0.0275/kWh, and other incentives
• Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, extending the PTC for 2021
• Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 (P.L. 116-37), extending the PTC through 2020 at a value of $0.015/kWh (Sec. 45)
• Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 (P.L. 114-113), which subsumed the previous 2015 law, extending the PTC for 2016-19 but at reduced rates for new facilities beginning construction in 2017, 2018, and 2019.
• Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015 (P.L. 114-113), extending the PTC through  2015 (Sec. 302)
• Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2014 (P.L. 113-295), extending the PTC through 2014 (Sec. 151)
• American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (P.L. 112-240), extending the PTC for one year through 2013 (Sec. 407)
• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (P.L. 111-5), extending the wind PTC three years through 2012
• Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-343), extending the wind PTC one year through 2010
• Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 (P.L. 109-432), extending the wind PTC one year through 2008 and 2009 (Sec. 201)
• Energy Policy Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-58), extending the PTC for 2006 and 2007 and extending the payment period through 10/1/2016 (Sec. 202)
• Working Families and Tax Relief Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-311), extending the wind PTC retroactively for 2004 and prospectively for 2005 (Sec. 313)
• Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-47), extending the wind PTC through 2003 (Sec. 603)
• Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act of 1999 (P.L. 106-170), extending the wind PTC for the balance of 1999 and in 2000 through 2001 (Sec. 507)
• The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (P.L. 102-486) enacted the renewable electricity production tax credit at $0.015/kWh, adjusted for inflation. Available for new projects beginning in 1993 for ten years, the provision was set to expire July 1, 1999.

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[1] “During the second World War, a massive 1,250-kilowatt wind electrical station was operated at ‘Grandpa’s Knob’ in the mountains of central Vermont. . . . The 1,250 kilowatts of power that the wind generator produced during sporadic periods of operation were fed into the lines of Central Vermont Public Service Corporation. The plant was conceived and designed by Palmer C. Putnam, an engineer who had become interested in wind power in the early 1930s when he built a house on Cape Cod only to find both the winds and electric utility rates ‘surprisingly high.’” – Wilson Clark, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), pp. 541-42.