Budget Deal Has Tax Credit Extensions For Nuclear, Fuel Cells, Carbon Capture (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A two-year budget deal was approved by the House and the Senate this morning and signed by President Trump a few hours later. The budget (PDF) included a slew of tax credit extensions that will affect how the energy industry plans its next two years. Most notably, the deal extended a $0.018 per-kWh credit for nuclear power plants over 6,000MW -- a tax credit that is primarily going to benefit one project in the US. That project is the construction of two new reactors at the Georgia Vogtle nuclear power plant.

Interestingly, a bipartisan effort to increase and extend tax credits for carbon sequestration passed through this budget. The bill was pushed through by Senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). The bill would offer a tax credit per ton of carbon dioxide that is captured and either sequestered, used for another end product, or used for enhanced oil recovery. The credit applies to any facility that started carbon capture construction within the past seven years, and the credit extends for 12 years.

While the budget deal leaves the federal tax credit scheme for electric vehicles unchanged (automakers can still entice buyers with a $7,500 credit for the first 200,000 electric vehicles that roll off that automaker's line), the budget did include and extend some interesting tax credits for other kinds of non-traditional energy. Fuel cell vehicles saw an extension of tax credits that will allow purchasers of new cars a tax credit of between $4,000 and $40,000, depending on the weight of the vehicle (this is probably good news for potential customers of Nikola's in-development fuel-cell semis). Non-hydrogen alternative fuel infrastructure also scored, as the new budget lets installers of infrastructure for alternative fuels like biodiesel and natural gas deduct 30 percent of the cost of installing the new pumps. Two-wheeled electric vehicle buyers will also see a 10-percent credit extended (though that credit has a $2,500 cap). Per-gallon biodiesel and renewable diesel credits that expired at the end of 2017 will continue.

Comments

Re:What do they have against solar/wind power?

[Mashiki]

Wind and Solar require that you place them in either exactly right area, or have high-uptime year round. Hell you can look in California and Texas over the last 40 years and find millions of dead solar farms and wind farms. They don't survive here because we already have cheap energy. In most cases they require massive subsidies in order to operate as well. North America is resource rich, very resource rich. It is cheaper to build a dam, and flood thousands of KM of land then it is to build windmills in mountain passes. Use the coal in the ground, build nuclear power plants well anywhere, lots of places to do that even in Western Canada.

Keep this in mind, because I'll now explain what drives people against green energy. In Ontario(again very resource rich), the government believed that handing huge tax breaks and giving massive payouts to get these things off the ground was a great idea. So to be viable, you could see rates where they were paid by the IESO upwards of $1.50kWh, most were in the $0.70-0.90kWh range. It broke the market. The price for electricity before they started paying these companies and microfits money hand over fist was around $0.09kWh at peak, off-peak $0.035-0.068kWh. 10 years later the peak because the entire province(mainly non-businesses) now pay $0.185kWh. The price that is still paid to these green energy boondongles is still in the $0.30-0.76kWh range.

This is what happened: Electricity rates are so high, that the government had to put into law that winter disconnection wasn't allowed. It does get down to -35C here most winters. Then there's the stories like this: The system is so broken because of green energy that people are making the "roof vs heat" choice. This is what happens when extreme poverty and high electricity prices collide(2016/2017) and the charities which pay for heating ran out of money in December of 2016. Most charities got more money this year, but again most will run out of funding by February. That still leaves, March and April, and possibly May(it can get as cold as -10C even here in Southern Ontario as late as May 24th - which most people consider the actual end of winter, it can also be 27C enjoy Canada yet?).

Ontario is interesting, because the government is very anti-industrial anything. Their entire economic policy was based on driving businesses out of the province and pushing 'service' jobs. So now you have people working 2-3 sometimes 4 PT-jobs to make ends meet, in a family that that's both parents working 3PT jobs and barely making ends meet in most of the province. Now, toss in those 30k illegals from the US? This is where it gets fun, because those people who couldn't even work or afford housing were being thrown out of low-income housing to put illegals up in them. FYI the average wait-time in most of Ontario for low-income housing is between 4 and 8 years.

And I'm sure someone is going to go, hur-dur it's all them conservatives fault. Sorry guys, this is 100% right on the Liberal Party of Ontario which has been in power since the early 00's.

Re:Or LA Gets Oxygen/Water/Graphite factories

[blindseer]

Where do we get the power for these processes? That's where the nuclear power credit comes in. Too bad California has declared itself a "nuclear free zone". It seems a bunch of idiots in California have equated nuclear power with nuclear weapons, and somehow that nuclear weapons are bad.

I wonder where how they think nuclear weapons are bad? I mean North Korea is developing nuclear weapons as a means to defend itself against nuclear weapon owning USA. I ask, does anything think that if the USA launched all it's nuclear weapons into the sun that North Korea would stop developing nuclear weapons? Obviously not. Nuclear weapons are a genie that can't be put back in the bottle. We can't wish them away.

If we are going to survive then that means nuclear power for clean air, and cheap energy. If we are going to keep idiots in North Korea and the rest of the world from taking it from us, or destroying it because they can't get it, then we need to have the ability to plausibly scour them from the surface of the planet. We are afforded the luxury to speak softly only so long as we have a big stick.

Those idiots in LA can protest nuclear power because we have nuclear powered "big sticks" like this one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...