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The Tax Reform Bill Could Hurt Wind and Solar Power

The Republican tax plan headed for a vote in the Senate could halt the rapid growth in solar and wind power in the United States.

An obscure provision of the tax bill — part of a provision to limit tax deductions for certain overseas activities — threatens a financing mechanism that generated $13 billion in investment in U.S. renewable energy this year, according to energy research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“This is Defcon One,” says Gregory Wetstone, president of the American Council On Renewable Energy. “It would simply undermine the financial structure that is critical for renewable energy and bring a booming sector to a halt.”

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The Senate tax bill would create a tax on such investments provided by multinational corporations. The exact rate of that tax would vary from company to company, but could be as high as 100% in some cases. It would also apply retroactively to previous tax years, meaning headaches for companies that have financed renewable energy projects in the past.

Still, the provision could wind up not becoming law even as the tax bill appears increasingly likely to pass. BNEF analyst Stephen Munro described the potential harm to the renewable energy industry as “collateral damage” rather than a deliberate attempt to hurt wind and solar power. That fact increases the chances that lobbyists will succeed in pushing the Senate to strike the provision. The tax bill that passed the House of Representatives does not contain a similar provision.


More: http://time.com/5042881/tax-reform-bill-solar-wind-power-renewable-energy/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2017120112pm&xid=newsletter-brief

Google Bought Enough Wind Power To Match 100 Percent Of Its Energy Use From 2017

Update | Google is going green—green enough to offset its entire nonrenewable energy consumption.

The company announced Thursday that it had purchased enough wind and solar energy to match 100 percent of the energy required to run its products in 2017. The clean energy purchases brought the company’s total wind and solar capacity to over three gigawatts.

“With solar and wind declining dramatically in cost and propelling significant employment growth, the transition to clean energy is driving unprecedented economic opportunity and doing so faster than we ever anticipated,” Gary Demasi, Google’s director of global infrastructure, said in a statement.

Google signed three contracts to reach its 2017 goal. The company purchased 140 megawatts from the Grand River Dam Authority’s Oklahoma wind farm; 200 megawatts from EDF Renewable Energy’s Iowa wind farm; and 196 megawatts from Avangrid Renewables’ two South Dakota wind farms.

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In the last six years, wind energy costs dropped by 60 percent and solar by 80 percent, according to a statement from Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, last year.


More: http://www.newsweek.com/google-will-be-powered-only-wind-and-solar-citing-massive-savings-728745



Wind-turbine generators in Desert Hot Springs, California, in 2011.
REUTERS

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