“After 25-years of subsidy-driven financing of renewable energy, Main Street Americans are now taxed billions annually so the richest Wall Street bankers and corporations can avoid their tax burden by funneling money to big wind development.”

“We support the House provision to remove the PTC inflation adjustment. Retaining the 2.4¢/kwh subsidy in light of lower installation costs and increased production confers a bounty on big wind that far exceeds what 1992 lawmakers could ever have envisioned.”

– Linowes letter to lawmakers (below)

With the Energy Policy Act of 1992, a substantial tax credit has gone wind’s way. A quarter-century and many extensions later, this gravy train is at risk of being partly derailed.

It’s about time.

While conferees will reconcile the House and Senate versions of the tax bill this week, it appears that a haircut will happen to industrial wind power via the Production Tax Credit (reduced amount, stricter calculation).…

“Why bad news and bad news only? Don’t the very reporters and staffers at InsideClimate News want to add optimism to their professional lives? Or is climate alarmism just a day job, a 9-to-5 gig, after which the real world comes into focus?”

“What would happen if some intrepid reporter or story gatherer broke the mold and reported on global lukewarming or on the benefits of CO2? What would his or her boss say? What would the head of fundraising say? What would the donors say?”

I read InsideClimate News (ICN) daily. And I am perplexed to see a nonprofit writing/information organization claiming the mantle of “clear,” “objective,” “independent,” and “non-partisan” dish up 100% climate alarmism and ad hominem argument against critics of the same. One would think that voluntary transactions between consenting adults, the ebb and flow of science, and skepticism against intellectual and political elites would be enough to investigate such topics as:

• Controversial US wind power projects
• Rent seeking in the US energy market (fossil fuel and renewables)
• Cronyism at the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA)
• Cronyism at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)
• Etc.,

“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.…

“… 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.