subsidies

 The Empire State continues to step up as an emerging national leader in supporting residential solar, as Governor Cuomo's recent budget plan includes new provisions that will open more opportunities for homeowners to install panels on their roof. The provisions are just the latest proposed measure to expand access to PV...[read more]

As a result of Germany's decision to phase-out its nuclear plants by 2022 and meet its self-imposed CO2 emissions targets, Germany will need to build out its renewables capacity to increase its renewable energy production. Almost all of that increased energy will be covered, i.e., subsidized, under existing renewable energy laws. ...[read more]

The basic math is pretty simple: most gasoline in the U.S. has about 10 percent ethanol, so the the 45 cents/gallon VEETC subsidy reduced the price of gasoline about 4.5 cents. The subsidy expired at the end of 2011, so one reason gasoline prices have gone up a few cents since New Year’s Day comes from the loss of the subsidy. (World...[read more]

Americans want the U.S. to lead the world in renewable energy, but these are screwy times in our nation’s capital. Some people are trying to turn clean, renewable energy into something dirty. The fossil fuel industry and the radical right, including Grover Norquist and politicians looking to score cheap political points, are taking on...[read more]

Recently it was announced that Range Fuels has gone into foreclosure, thus marking the official end of their story. For all practical purposes, the company has been finished since early 2011, but the foreclosure puts an end to the notion that they will yet rise triumphant from the ashes. Last week, Heather Duncan — a reporter for The...[read more]

The usual custom among energy systems analysts is to make projections regarding future energy consumption and work back from those projections to what is required to meet them. Following business-as-usual practices, Brussels projects a doubling of Europe’s energy consumption by 2050, and that 60-80% of the energy generation in 2050 will...[read more]

“I was a huge supporter of cap and trade,” said Wayne Leonard, the CEO of Entergy, a $11 billion utility company. “We developed enormously elegant solutions, but they couldn’t get done.” Taxing carbon emissions is the next best way to deal with the threat of global climate disruptions, he said, in part because it would give the energy...[read more]

The U.S. Now Uses More Corn For Fuel Than For Feed: For every 10 ears of corn that are grown in the United States today, only 2 are consumed directly by humans as food. The remaining 8 are used in almost equal shares for animal feed and for ethanol. And, for the 12 months from August 2011 to 2012, the U.S. biofuels industry used more...[read more]

Our national conversation has become so politicized that it’s hard to talk about anything without setting off an argument. Not the weather. And certainly not the failure of Solyndra, the solar company that went bankrupt after getting a $535 million loan from the Obama administration. Today’s hearing of the Republican-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, focusing in part on Solyndra, was more like an inquisition than a fact-finding exercise. It was titled “How Obama’s Green Energy Agenda is Killing Jobs.” That was before the testimony began.[read more]

Just when it seemed like the debate about repealing oil and gas subsidies had faded away, President Obama gave the issue new life. Speaking at the White House yesterday, Obama proposed cutting certain tax credits to profitable oil and gas companies to pay for part of his $467 billion job-creation package.[read more]

 Overview: Mandates, Zero Production, Penalties, and the Failure of the Current System  In the previous post, I discussed the annual ritual of rolling back the cellulosic ethanol mandates by 90% or more. For three years running, cellulosic ethanol production will come in far, far short of the mandated target volumes. In fact,...[read more]

Consumers will end up footing the bill for the £1 billion windfall that nuclear power companies can expect to get from the government's support for this dangerous technology.The Carbon Price Floor system that has been proposed by the Treasury is estimated to provide £1 billion each for nuclear power developers and renewable energy...[read more]

Given the remarkable longevity of the tax credit for ethanol blended into gasoline, it seems fitting that it would take a problem on the scale of the massive US deficit and $14 trillion federal debt to trigger its demise. Yet despite a widely-publicized Senate vote in June and the announcement of a key compromise among three Senators...[read more]

The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable. Clean tech crashes are nothing new. The U....[read more]

This is Part IV of my review of Doug Koplow's "Nuclear Power: Still not viable without subsidies." In Part I, I examined the definition of subsidies and looked at several limiting cases, including subsidies to an energy related project, the Cape Wind Project. Par II focused on Government policy toward the domestic Uranium mining...[read more]