Clean energy arrived in B'game last year and the City newsletter provides an update on its implementation:
A lot has happened since Burlingame joined Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE) last year:
- 14,747 accounts enrolled in PCE (98%).
- 240 accounts buying 100% renewable energy in ECO100 rate.
- $1 million in savings to customers.
- 39 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions avoided which is like removing 3,788 cars from the road for a year.
Enrolling in PCE, especially their 100% renewable energy option (ECO100) is the single easiest step a person can take to support energy innovation and reduce emissions. If you haven't already, sign up here. Keep up the good work Burlingame residents and businesses.
The last time I drove over the Altamont Pass I was surprised at how many of the wind mills were idle. The economics of these turbines has always been a bit cloudy and the discussion as I drove with a buddy revolved around the maintenance costing more than the power was worth. It could be that or just the raw economics. The tax reform discussion going on in D.C. caused the Wall Street Journal to provide this little tidbit
Since 1992 the wind industry has lived off a “production tax credit” that begins with construction of a turbine and lasts 10 years. The original value of the credit was 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour but the law included an annual inflation adjustment. As Warren Buffett explained in 2014: We “get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” This also explains why producers are known to sell their output below cost merely to cash in on the subsidy.
By 2015 the credit was up to 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour at a cost to the feds of $2.6 billion. That’s when Congress passed legislation to reduce the production tax credit 20% a year, starting in 2017, with a goal of ending the subsidy after 2020—though a turbine that qualifies up to that last year would continue to receive credits for 10 years.
One draft of the tax plan gets rid of the credit altogether, but the wind lobby is blowing back hard against that move. Three of the nine clean power sources we use are wind including Altamont. I wonder it that will hold up if the credit is blown away?
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