tax credits
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Tax expenditures: a boring thing you should be outraged about
In budget terms, tax expenditures may look the same as simple government spending, but the political differences are enormously important.
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Overcoming the roadblocks to democratizing the electricity system – part 5 of 5
A serialized version of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 4 of 5. Click for Part 1 or Part 2 or Part 3 or Part 4. Overcoming the Roadblocks to Democratizing the Electricity System The electricity grid system has become host to a distributed generation phenomenon that has developed in a largely hostile […]
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The new biodiesel boom
Last year, about a third of the biodiesel plants in the country went idle and output fell by half. But now federal tax credits and renewable energy mandates mean that biodiesel is booming again and plants are opening back up.
Their hold on success is tenuous, though: it depends, the industry says, on Congress extending a tax credit that pushes fuel blenders to include biofuel. The current boom started when Congress restored that credit back in December. But that was only a one-year reboot. For the industry to revive completely, producers say they need a longer extension. -
Could California Save 30 Percent or More on Solar Power?
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. The Golden State has covered over 50,000 roofs with solar PV in the past decade, but could it also save 30% or more on its current solar costs? Renewable energy guru Paul Gipe wrote up a […]
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Cooperative South Dakota wind farm nets 600 local owners
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. With the right renewable energy policy, hundreds of individuals can have a stake in a renewable energy future. That’s what happened with a cooperatively-owned wind project in South Dakota, where 7 turbines from a larger wind project […]
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Oregon town gets a lot of solar for a little money
The upfront cost has always been the biggest barrier to solar photovoltaic adoption, and one Oregon town has found an innovative way to help its citizens buy down that cost.
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Cash incentives for renewables are twice as effective as tax credits
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Using the tax code rather than cash incentives to support wind and solar power costs ratepayers significantly more. I wrote about this problem last year because project developers were selling their federal tax credits to third […]
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Giving clean energy developers cash works better than tax credits, stupid US policy notwithstanding
One of the great undercovered aspects of U.S. energy policy is the fact that most of it happens through the tax code. That’s one reason it’s so unbearably lame. Why do we do energy policy this way? There are many reasons, but a big one is that decades of conservative agitprop have made it almost […]
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Federal solar tax credits rule out half of Americans
The difference between democratizing clean energy policies and the U.S. system can be illustrated with a look at the federal solar tax credit.