Wind power angling for new handouts as PTC is set to expire (From Council on Foreign Relations)

Beware any coming electrical blackouts as they'll surely be used as pretext for an attempt to have taxpayers fund a revamp of the grid.

A New Dawn for Wind Energy Infrastructure After the Production Tax Credit Sunset

The wind industry is approaching the end of its federal financial support. The Production Tax Credit (PTC), which was designed to drive investment by providing reductions in tax liability for renewable energy producers, is set to expire for large wind facilities at the end of this year, meaning that no wind projects entering construction or procuring equipment after the next few months will be eligible for federal support. Political leaders around the country are debating the best ways to continue supporting the wind industry. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) asked recently whether the wind industry still needs help at all. There is little doubt that wind power is more competitive now than when the incentives were first introduced, but in a market saturated with incentives for coal, gas, and solar power, the wind industry will need new and innovative policies to continue propelling its growth. A new set of federal support mechanisms that expand transmission infrastructure, research and development, and energy storage while reducing investor risk through a loan guarantee program would create a more equitable market environment that will promote the wind energy buildout.

Originally enacted in 1992, the PTC for wind began to phase out in 2017, with the credit set to drop to 0 percent of its original value at the end of 2019. In practice, however, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will allow facilities up to four years to come online, so the credit will be in effect for existing projects until 2023. The PTC offered a tax credit to eligible energy producers based on the amount of electricity produced. To take full advantage of this incentive, given that few energy producers have a high enough tax burden to make full use of the credits, wind energy producers typically form partnerships with larger firms that have greater tax liabilities, transferring the credits as a form of equity in the project. This gives wind producers two main financial benefits: an initial cash injection once the project connects to the grid that can be used to pay off construction loans, and an alternative source of income for the project untethered from electricity pricing risk. Once the project is operational, the tax equity investor is allocated a certain proportion of the project’s revenues, losses, and tax credits until it attains a target return on investment. At that point, the partnership structure “flips” and the project’s value begins accruing primarily to whomever owns the nontax “sponsor” equity.

While the PTC has worked as intended in generating revenue and catalyzing wind buildout, some drawbacks emerged as the industry matured. One issue was the limited pool of investors with both a tax liability high enough to reap the full value of the PTC and the necessary risk appetite and financial and legal understanding to enter into a complicated tax partnership. Therefore, most investors in the tax equity space are either heavyweight investment banks or the in-house financing shops of major equipment manufacturers like Siemens and General Electric. This has created a huge mismatch between the number of projects under development and the limited amount of capital available to finance those developments, which allows tax equity providers to exert a great deal of leverage over how many and which types of projects get built in a given year.

Additionally, tax equity is a more expensive form of capital than long-term debt in a low-interest rate environment, with target returns ranging as high as eight percent. One turbine manufacturer, Vestas, estimates that switching to other financing sources that have less complicated structures will still allow for profitability albeit at a lower margin than under the PTC. With the tax equity revenue stream unavailable, it is possible that investors, developers, suppliers, and construction firms will come to accept lower margins and premiums, as has already been the case for the more competitive solar market, where investors and participants throughout the entire value-chain do not expect as large returns. In the end, wind energy may become less lucrative, but ending the PTC does not change the record-low cost of wind energy itself, nor will it slow the deployment of high-efficiency turbines and performance-maximizing software, which will continue to push costs lower still. This means wind power will remain competitive against natural gas despite the loss of tax credits, especially in the central and western United States.

This resilience in the face of the tax equity cliff does not necessarily mean that the PTC has outlived its usefulness. The financiers of the wind industry will need to evaluate whether the amount of money and effort it takes to originate, develop, finance, construct, and operate a wind farm will still be an attractive use of capital. Wind energy will be uniquely disadvantaged in that evaluation, as it will be competing unsubsidized against other energy resources currently receiving government financial support. This evaluation could be even less favorable in more competitive and established energy markets like the Pennsylvania New Jersey Maryland Interconnection (PJM), where cheap existing sources of natural gas electricity and obtuse rules surrounding their Reliability Pricing Model, which requires suppliers to guarantee production into the future, can make it difficult for new wind plants to make an entry.

Continue reading here:

https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-dawn-wind-energy-infrastructure-after-...

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Comment by John F. Hussey on July 18, 2019 at 12:56pm

NO MORE TAX giveaways for UNRELIABLE and Non-dispatchable WIND "power"!

 

Maine as Third World Country:

CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power

 

Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.

Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT

******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********

(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/

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Hannah Pingree on the Maine expedited wind law

Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future

"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."

https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/

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