Senator Charles Grassley is known to be a long time fiscal conservative Republican Senator from Iowa. Obviously, the size and scope of the Iowa wind industry belies the anti-renewable propaganda of the science denial right. In speaking up this way, Senator Grassley offers powerful support and factual underpinning scrutinizing the web of subsidies that fossil fuels have enjoyed for more than a century.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) spoke up about the “intellectually dishonest argument” that bubbled to the surface at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on April 3rd.
His remarks were in response to an amendment introduced by Sen. Toomey (R-PA), under the short title “Eliminate crony capitalist energy tax credits,” which proposed to eliminate the renewable energy Production Tax Credit (PTC), as well as credits for renewable fuels, energy efficient appliances, electric motorcycles and fuel cell vehicles. In explaining the amendment, Sen. Toomey declared wind power to be a “politically favored form of energy.”
Senator Grassley gave a powerful response that put energy tax credits in context.
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Sen. Toomey’s amendment failed by a vote of 18-6 in the Senate Finance Committee. Senators Toomey (R-PA), Isakson (R-GA), Roberts (R-KS), Burr (R-NC), Hatch (R-UT) and Enzi (R-WY) supported it, and the remainder of the Committee members opposed.
The Committee later approved, via voice vote, the Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency (EXPIRE) Act of 2014. This bill includes an extension of the renewable energy production tax credit (PTC) and investment tax credit (ITC) which would let wind energy developers qualify for the tax credits if they start construction on their wind projects by the end of 2015. The next step will be for the EXPIRE Act to move to the Senate floor for consideration.
In the broader picture, the Senate Finance Committee members agree that they wish to address tax reform in a comprehensive fashion, rather than through short-term bills like this one. Chairman Wyden (D-OR) declared that this consideration of the EXPIRE ACT would be the last time that the Committee works on tax extension provisions. They plan to pivot to comprehensive tax reform in the future.
I second that amendment.
All in favor say aye.
I vote a resounding NAY on the amendment, since Toomey was trying to gut support for renewables by proposing it.
I vote AYE in support of the committee’s later action in voting to send the EXPIRE Act (without Toomey’s amendment) to the full Senate.
(And everyone had better start sending $$$ money to the DSCC and any and all Democratic candidates for Senate. If the Repugnants gain control of the Senate, things will NOT get better).
Oops. I got it backwards. 🙂
No, Arcus got it backward, and you just followed along. It was also nice to see that some other Republicans followed Grassley’s lead and voted against the Toomey amendment. Maybe they’re not all ideological lemmings?
Even my Texas Senator, “Big Bad” John Cornyn, voted with Grassley.
Big Bad John must have gotten it backwards too.
If not, it’s the only “smart” thing I can remember him ever doing.
I meant the Grassley amendment, which already carried as the EXPIRE act and as a validation of Grassley’s speech. 🙂 (a strange case of common sense in the halls of congress)
If wind is so economic, why does it need another round of tax credits?
Is there any form of power generation that isn’t subsidized? Why does Vogtle 3&4 need an $8.33B loan guarantee?
Vogtle needs a loan guarantee, because without it, it would not even be built.
Wind has no PTC for wind farms built right now. Nuclear has a PTC. So lets get rid of nuclear PTC and all the other subsidies for oil, gas, and coal. Then if we had a subsidy for wind, it would actually be a subsidy and not just a way to level the playing field with multi decade old competitors that should not get any subsidy at all. Wind is competitive and growing, but at a subsidy disadvantage because subsidies are on a yo yo. The rest of the industries have no such restriction. Why are we even talking about ending wind subsidies? What an idiotic idea. As Grassley said, its bonkers to be giving subsidies to mature 50 and 100 year old industries. If they are profitable, they don’t need any. If they are not profitable, a subsidy is not going to make them profitable. The fallacy of nuclear subsidies is that they are not making nuclear affordable. Nuclear is only getting more unaffordable. Thats just good money after bad. Wind and solar costs are ramping down rapidly. That is money well spent. NPP cost from 11 to 15 cents/kwhr. Wind is 5 cents/kwhr. Nuclear is no longer competitive, and its not getting any better. Depending on location, solar lower than 10 cents/kwhr. The future is renewables.
False. Construction on both new Vogtle units started before the loan guarantees were signed; those plants were going ahead regardless. Further, the owners of the two AP1000’s at Virgil C. Summer never asked for guarantees.
So now that the shoe is FINALLY on the other foot, you cry unfair?
Nuclear construction has been OUT OF BUSINESS for 3 decades because of political action by UCS, PSR, RMI, Greenpeace and their fossil-fuel backers. The original wind PTC was intended to get the industry going. 40 years on, wind is going; it’s time to make it stand on its own and give nuclear a hand up after government knocked it down. Further, the nuclear PTC is extremely limited. It is restricted to the first 6 GW(e) of capacity built, and only pays out over ~5500 GWh/year (there are 8760 or 8784 hours in a year).
Basically, the PTC is an incentive to get the first few units through the new NRC Combined Operating License hoops.
There are 4 AP1000’s under construction right now, at 1110 MW(e) apiece. Another one would bring the total capacity to 5550 MW(e). There’s no room for even a sixth under the terms of the PTC law. You call that a big giveaway to the industry?
Wind is supposedly competitive with existing nuclear plants, but nobody wanted to build wind farms if there wasn’t a PTC in effect. The PTC makes it economic to sell at negative wholesale prices. How is that fair, for taxpayers to be paying for power that nobody needs and the producers have to pay the grid to take?
This directly implicates grid reliability, so I’ll just give you a few quotes from this PowerMag article:
Ooh, that smarts. More:
You’ve ignored me, but maybe you’ll listen when a utility president says it:
You heard the man: had those plants already been retired, the lights would have gone out last January. The consequences of widespread power failures would have been fatal to some and devastating to many. Taking the current course, those blackouts are on the way.
Ask yourself this: do YOU want “environmentalism” and “clean energy” to take the blame when that happens? You’re setting yourself up for a fall that will discredit your organizations and goals for at least a generation. The “Climategate” e-mail scandal was totally fabricated; just wait until your enemies have a disaster that’s REAL, and has your fingerprints all over it.
The first megawatt-scale grid-connected wind generator closed the breaker in 1941, and smaller units go back decades earlier. Your industry is around 90 years old. It’s beyond the age when it should be getting training wheels and an allowance. It has enjoyed massive legal favoritism for decades, including outright mandates for use (RPS’s). If we’re going to keep carbon out of the atmosphere, political correctness has to take a back seat to effectiveness.
If you’re right, there won’t be any more units built after the current set and the problem is self-limiting. If you’re wrong, you should rejoice: nuclear does a far better job of de-carbonizing electric power than wind and solar[1], and that’s a win for the environment. OTOH, you might hate nuclear more than you want to protect nature….
You’re really fuzzy on this, so I’ll say it again: wind energy may be 5¢/kWh (after 2.2¢/kWh PTC subsidy!), but dispatchable power from wind is another matter entirely. Converting energy-when-the-wind-blows to power-when-the-switch-is-thrown requires either lots and lots of storage, or lots and lots of backup. The storage doesn’t exist, and policies which make wind look so cheap and so successful are destroying that backup. This means that the success is not real, and the reality behind the Potempkin village will become undeniable.
[1] Compare the per-kWh carbon emissions of the German and Danish grids to Sweden or France; the “green” countries emit several times the CO2 of the nuclear countries. Sweden and France (and Ontario) can make major cuts in emissions simply by switching from other energy sources to electricity, and have the magical 1 ton/capita/year target in their sights. Germany and Denmark can’t, and don’t.
A loan guarantee is not a subsidy? Tell the financiers. The loan guarantee provides a lower interest rate. It puts the risk on the taxpayer. Thats a subsidy. Nuclear has a very high default rate. A loan guarantee is there because no private money will go for a deal without it. Too risky.
“More pointedly, the Congressional Budget Office in 2003 said the default risk for new nuclear reactors would be “very high – well above 50 percent.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0216/Budget-watchdogs-see-folly-in-US-loan-guarantees-for-nuclear-power
“In fact, the economics of the nuclear industry look so dicey that Wall Street banks—no strangers to high-risk investments—have for several years balked at financing new plants unless the government underwrites the deal. “There will be no nuclear renaissance beyond what the government is willing to underwrite,” Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is now a professor at Vermont Law School, told Mariah Blake in a recent piece for Mother Jones. And the nuclear industry has not been shy about announcing its reliance on the taxpayer. “Without loan guarantees we will not build nuclear power plants,” Michael J. Wallace, co-chief executive of UniStar Nuclear and vice president of Constellation Energy, told the New York Times in 2007. That means the government would assume almost all the risk.”
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0216/Budget-watchdogs-see-folly-in-US-loan-guarantees-for-nuclear-power
The Vogtle loan guarantee isn’t a subsidy. The owners are paying an up-front fee for the service, and not a small one either. This goes straight to Treasury.
The loan guarantee pays Washington for the sake of having skin in the game. If the PTB use the NRC to kill the project, they have to make good the losses. This would produce blowback, which the PTB would rather avoid.
The loan guarantee is protection money, pure and simple.
Did I mention how stupid it is to be talking about subsidies on young industries while keeping the ones on centuries old FF industry? Logically, the centuries old industry subsidies would go first, then the next oldest industry, until we got to the youngest, not yet mature industries.
So many canards in so many sentences. Not good for a poet.
Cato Institute: There’s “Zero Evidence” That Environmental Opposition Is Preventing New Nuclear Plants. Jerry Taylor of the libertarian Cato Institute stated in a post for Wall Street Journal’s “The Experts” that “Nuclear proponents like to dodge the cost estimates and assert that it is environmental opposition preventing new plant orders. But there’s zero evidence for this proposition”:
Nuclear power simply cannot compete with gas-fired power. And absent some major technological breakthrough, it’s unlikely to do so in the future.
This is not a matter of opinion. This is a matter of economic fact. Even with all of the production tax credits, loan guarantees and a battery of other direct and indirect subsidies, nuclear power remains the most expensive source of conventional electricity on the grid once capital costs are plugged into the equation. That’s why no one has ordered a new nuclear power plant in decades. That’s why nuclear power plants are being retired today in the face of cheap natural gas for as far as the eye can see.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/11/07/myths-and-facts-about-nuclear-power/196793#environmentalists
Here is nuclear powers US contribution to lowering carbon going forward …
Nuclear power generation in the United States is falling. After increasing rapidly since the 1970s, electricity generation at U.S. nuclear plants began to grow more slowly in the early 2000s. It then plateaued between 2007 and 2010—before falling more than 4 percent over the last two years. Projections for 2013 show a further 1 percent drop. With reactors retiring early and proposed projects being abandoned, U.S. nuclear power’s days are numbered.
It would take decades and way more capital to produce the 100s of nuclear reactors necessary to make even a modest dent in carbon. With only so much capital it cannot be spent on the most expensive energy. Nuclear is in decline.
It simply can’t make an impact. Too expensive, too little, too slow.
Nuclear costs keep rising, renewables get better faster than any other source.
Compare the curves.
http://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/us-nuclear-power-decline.html
http://rameznaam.com/2013/11/14/solar-power-is-dropping-faster-than-i-projected/