IRS Guidance Gives Wind Projects Another Year to Qualify for the PTC

Here are some of the stories we’re reading this morning.

Julia Pyper March 13, 2015

Julia Pyper

Senior Editor
Greentech Media

Julia Pyper is a Senior Editor at Greentech Media covering the energy transition. She is also the host and producer of the Political Climate podcast. She previously reported for E&E Publishing, and has covered clean energy and climate change issues across the U.S. and abroad, including in India, Haiti, Israel and the Maldives. She holds degrees from McGill and Columbia Universities. Find her on Twitter @JMPyper.

Recharge: IRS PTC Guidance Helps U.S. Wind Industry in 2015-16

U.S. wind developers that started construction on projects prior to this year now have until the end of 2016 to place them in service to be eligible for the federal Production Tax Credit, which Congress renewed last December before it lapsed at year end.

Under prior Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidance, those projects had to be in service by the end of this year.

The three-page IRS ruling is favorable for the wind industry, as it allows developers to qualify for the PTC without having to do so under the more onerous “continuous construction” or “continuous work” standards.

Solar Industry: Report Shows Utilities Increasingly Focused on Solar and Storage

A new report shows utility companies in North America are intensifying their focus on advanced energy storage and solar.

Analysts at research firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) tracked 52 clean energy requests for proposals (RFPs) in 2014. According to the report, solar dominated the market, both in capacity (1.8 gigawatts) and quantity (27 RFPs). There was also a significant amount of interest -- at least 12 RFPs -- in other cleantech technologies, particularly energy storage.

CleanTechnica: Vehicle-Grid Integration Revenue Could Be Worth Nearly $21 Million by 2024

Though electric vehicles represent just a tiny fraction of the cars on the road today, over the next decade analysts believe millions of plug-in vehicles will be bought. This means big business for companies looking to take advantage of advances in vehicle-to-grid integration (VGI), which could exceed $20 million within the next 10 years according to a study by Navigant Research.

Now I’ll grant you that $21 million doesn’t seem like a particularly impressive amount of money, especially considering it takes about $1 billion to build a brand-new vehicle from the ground up. But in 2015, annual vehicle-to-grid integration revenue is expected to amount to just $335,000, as automakers and utilities begin to roll out the first pilot programs for grid storage and charging-on-demand.

Bloomberg: Three China Solar-Panel Groups May Lose EU Duty Exemption

The European Union plans to apply tariffs on three groups of Chinese solar-panel makers that have been exempted from the levies, potentially reviving tensions in the EU’s biggest trade case of its kind.

The three producer groups, which include Canadian Solar Inc. subsidiaries, breached the terms of a price-floor accord that underpinned the exemption, according to a European Commission document obtained by Bloomberg News. The ET Solar and ReneSola groups are the other two accused in the document of violating the agreement to respect a minimum selling price.

The Energy Collective: Washington Post: President Obama Is Lying About the Keystone Pipeline

One thing that I find unacceptable on either side is lies that are told in support or in opposition of the pipeline. If President Obama opposes the pipeline -- which he clearly does -- he should stop simply kicking the can down the road and take a stand. That may be what a politician does, but it isn’t what a leader should do. A leader should take a stand.

Instead, when President Obama vetoed a bill recently that would have sped up the approval process for the Keystone XL pipeline, he repeated several false claims which were in direct contradiction to the U.S. State Department assessment of the project. The Washington Post -- not exactly a bastion of Republicans out to discredit the president -- recently took him to task on these claims, and Obama’s claim that Keystone XL oil ‘bypasses the U.S.’ earns Four Pinocchios.