“Big Wind and Big Solar won’t have to stop feeding at the federal trough for decades to come,” writes Robert Bryce in Forbes.
In the gigantic bill just signed by the president:
“[T]he tax credits for solar and wind are the most expensive energy-related provisions in the tax code. Between 2021 and 2031, the tax credits will cost the federal treasury $113 billion. The investment tax credit (ITC), used by the solar industry, will cost federal taxpayers about $60 billion. The production tax credit (PTC), which expired at the beginning of this year and is used by the wind industry, will cost about $53 billion. For comparison, the oil and gas sector will get about $29 billion in tax credits and the nuclear sector will get a paltry $3.4 billion.
Massive subsidies didn’t start with this bill, of course:
“The tax credits for wind and solar have become a favored tax-avoidance scheme for some of America’s biggest corporations. NextEra Energy (market capitalization: $180 billion), the world’s biggest producer of renewable energy, has feasted on the PTC. In its latest 10-K filing, the company reported nearly $4.3 billion in federal tax credit carryforwards, which assure it won’t be paying federal income taxes for many years to come. Berkshire Hathaway Energy a subsidiary of corporate giant Berkshire Hathaway (market capitalization: $650 billion) and a major developer of wind and solar projects in Iowa and other states, has collected about $2.7 billion in tax credits over the past three years. A note to the company’s financial statement says that the $2.7 billion “‘includes significant production tax credits from wind-powered electricity generation.’”
Image by Ahmad Ardity from Pixabay. (It is a plan, not reality.)