WASHINGTON, Aug. 2, 2016 – U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) today urged the administration to reconsider a proposal to provide new incentives to wind power producers who are already benefiting from the 24-year-old wind production tax credit. Alexander also pointed out that the proposal fails to provide any incentive for nuclear energy – this country’s largest source of clean electricity.
“Wind developers have been getting rich on the backs of taxpayers and the wind production tax credit for over two decades, and there is no reason they should receive additional incentives to build unreliable and unsightly wind turbines,” Alexander wrote in a letter to Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, urging against the program’s proposed Clean Energy Incentive Program.
EPA’s Clean Energy Incentive Program would give the wind industry a new benefit — the EPA and States would provide Emission Rate Credits for wind power producers who could then sell these credits to other carbon-emitting power producers. Wind developers already benefit from the wind production tax credit, which Congress extended for the 10th time in December. The extension, which continued the credit through 2019, will cost taxpayers more than $20 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Sen. Alexander, who opposes subsidies for wind, a mature energy source, introduced legislation in July that would cut the wind production tax credit early, ending it on Jan. 1, 2017, and then use the $8.1 billion in savings to increase the authorized funding levels for basic energy research at the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.