Solar tax credits
We were glad to see that the federal government, specifically the Bureau of Land Management, came to its senses before too much harm was done and announced last week it was lifting a freeze on new solar energy developments on public lands, about a month after the original edict went into effect.
The justification for the suspension of processing new applications to build solar power plants in six Western states was that they needed more time to study the environmental impacts of solar energy, and that they were already severely backlogged with pre-existing applications.
While we can appreciate the practicality of wanting to manage an overflow of applications wisely, it’s nevertheless remarkable that offshore drilling for oil gets the rapt attention of the President of the United States, while the solar industry has to push and claw to get a spectacularly ill-timed moratorium on renewable (and non-OPEC) energy reversed. Offshore drilling has its place, but only as one of several initiatives that need to be pushed. You would have thought solar energy would have been right up there at the top.
Solar energy isn’t the magic bullet that will slay the energy predicament we’ve managed to have gotten ourselves into. Wth the connivance of Congress, the White House and the auto industry since that late 1980s, a series of opportunities were missed that could have prevented the debacle of $4 per gallon gasoline. But that’s history now. The issue is what are we going to do going forward.
Amazingly, Congress is doing its share in the dithering dance, leaving town for its July 4th break without getting around to passing an extension — an improvement of the existing legislation was probably too much to hope for — of the solar tax credit. That legislation is scheduled to expire later this year. It could stand an upgrade — an individual who wants to install a solar array on a home would only get at best a $2,000 break on a system that would typically cost a lot more than that. The credit should be augmented substantially, but given Congressional lassitude on all but the most pressing of issues, and the fact that this is an election year, simply renewing the credit for another year or two is probably the most that can be hoped for. Then, with a new administration in the white house, a fuller, more sweeping proposal might gain traction.
It’s non-performance like this that gets Congress its 13 percent approval rating, lower, by a wide margin, than that of President George W. Bush.
Solar power, like all the other alternatives, needs as much federal assistance as possible, ideally via tax credits, to help it get off the ground and develop a critical mass to become cost competitive with fossil fuels. The two lines are converging as the technology gets better, but now is the time to really pour it on, in order to break the bonds of the oil-exporting nations. Unlike biofuels such as ethanol, and especially those derived from corn, solar doesn’t offer the potential boomerang of higher prices for food or some other commodity. But neither is solar power a darling of politically powerful farm belt legislators.
Again, there is no single answer to our energy policy problem, but the fact that the Bureau of Land Management had to be browbeaten into reversing its ill-thought out policy, and Congress is dragging its feet on an obvious piece of legislation, is troubling.