Budget Deal Has Tax Credit Extensions For Nuclear, Fuel Cells, Carbon Capture (arstechnica.com) 104
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.
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.
Trump (Score:1, Insightful)
Gets all the negativity when he signs a bill the left hates, but receives 0 credit for signing a bill the left praises.
Re: Trump (Score:1)
So said the economically ignorant socialist millennial. Thank you for your useless input based on nothing.
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Last I checked American universities seemed to be in the business of having gay men say a bunch of stupid stuff in front of college students. They'll even give you a degree if you do it often enough.
They aren't ALL gay men. Some of them are bisexuals, lesbians, and transsexuals. Like Prof. McCloskey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I remember his/her name because it was mentioned as an author to a paper one of my instructors recommended that we read, which happened to be about the same time he/she was interviewed on The Rubin Report. Prof. McCloskey taught in a handful of schools in the Midwest, including Iowa.
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Don't call someone a Nazi if they didn't earn it. Trump is not a Nazi, he hasn't forced millions to die in ovens to later sell off the hair, clothes, and gold teeth of the dead.
What happens when people call someone a Nazi that just, metaphorically speaking, wrote them a $1000 check in the form of a pay bonus or in the increase on their tax return? People will equate being a Nazi with not being all that bad.
Trump quite likely is far from an ideal person to have as POTUS. It's also possible he's mentally d
Re:Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't have to be a Nazi to enforce the laws that are already on the books.
OTOH demonizing immigrants is one hallmark of a Nazi.
Having your brownshirts beat the crap out of people at your rallies is another.
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You seem to be angry...are you angry? I think you're angry.
All the Nazis are on the Left; Soros (the darling of the Left) is an actual, bonafide, Hitler-loving Nazi.
Need to look in the mirror dude. And
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I agree. We need to keep Trump in office. If lower taxes, an improved economy, and lower unemployment is the result of him drinking Diet Coke and coloring with crayons then keep him there. Then when his second term is up then we need another do nothing idiot. Perhaps an idiot with better tastes in soft drinks, but whatever. At least he doesn't drink Bud Light like the last POTUS.
Can we get a POTUS that just likes coffee with a little cream and sugar? Or even just black coffee? I guess either choice w
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This budget is going to make it nigh impossible for all three of those points to be true in 10 years.
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More jobs were added to the US economy in Obama's first year than Trump's.
I'm sure that was Bush's fault.
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I give him credit for being mostly inactive during this round.
And that's almost certainly how this one came about, Trump had little to no idea what it was he was signing, he just had something put in front of him on his tiny little table and got to scribble on it with his crayon. Don't credit Trump for anything in there, credit everyone else for slipping whatever they wanted in there for Trump to rubberstamp.
Speaking of which, what else did he sign into law without reading it? What booby-traps are hidden in there?
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That's perfectly normal usage. It's weird that you'd focus on that aspect and not on the fact that Nikola is a company running purely on hype and without anywhere near the funding to achieve what they want to, nor the fact that none of their numbers actually add up. Or the fact that they keep changing their business model once or twice a year.
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"If true, this could double Nike's profits in 2 years."
To you, this is an abuse of English? Methinks you're perhaps overestimating your authority on the subject.
Nuclear credit (Score:3, Insightful)
So, will the nuclear credit cover the billions of dollars of cost in regulatory and judicial delays to nuclear construction? Nuclear is competitive; malicious politics is very expensive.
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I suspect the USA will have cheap and plentiful nuclear energy about one year after China or Russia does.
It used to be that the USA yearned to be first and best in everything, now it just doesn't want to end up in third place. What happened? Why is second place good enough?
so planting trees gets us tax credit (Score:1)
Re:so planting trees gets us tax credit (Score:5, Insightful)
not bad, what's the ##
What's the ... catch?
Reforestation is important, not just to capture carbon but also to replace trees lost to logging, development, fires, disease, and pests.
The catch is that trees take a long time to grow. So they are only part of the solution to all of the above. Managing existing forests carefully has to be considered also.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If Democrats cared about the environment they'd have kicked Carter in the balls for holding up nuclear power. The Democrats have held up nuclear power since Carter signed the law that created the Department of Energy. They spent all this money on a cabinet level department to solve our energy problems and we've not seen a new nuclear power plant in 40 years.
If the issue is energy independence, clean air and water, and reducing our carbon dioxide output then they've failed miserably. This is because of th
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Not just planting trees but also growing them and harvesting them - in other words sustainable forestry.
Even better than trees, in terms of carbon sequestering, is pasture. Pasture sucks up far more carbon than forest and then our livestock turns that biomass (grass, clover, etc) into delicious meat. Green eggs and ham. This too is carbon sequestering.
Those are both part of what we do on our farm but I doubt that there will be any tax benefit.
Or LA Gets Oxygen/Water/Graphite factories (Score:1)
That Carbon Sequester tax credit could very well be a major environmental solution for Los Angeles. Take sea water, use electrolysis to get oxygen and hydrogen. Bottle the oxygen for medical purposes. Add smog to the hydrogen, use the Bosch process to create water and bulk graphite. Sell the bulk graphite for pencils or whatever, gather the distilled water and sell it for filling swimming pools.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Given the process, tidal generators would make a bit more sense than nuclear. (if you're sucking up seawater anyway for electrolysis, it's nothing to sequester a bit more in your tidal pool then add turbines on the outflow).
What do they have against solar/wind power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon capture? Really? As in the fig leaf that defines 'clean coal'?
I understand that the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good - but the whole clean coal thing mostly marketing for essentially free-wheeling carbon spewing, rather than an actual process to prevent environmental degredation.
It's like one of those phone calls for police/firefighter funerals - that when asked only give "up to" 15% of their take to their cause - they're PRETENDING to give to something you want to help, eating up all the good will that should be going to something the public wants to help, consuming that good will while the actual cause withers.
Sure - carbon capture can take a small percentage off of some effects of carbon spewing - but it only exists to pretend that you're doing something about a fundamentally wrong approach for our shared efforts as humans. It's basically the opposite of actually doing anything for the environment and the future of humanity - a fig leaf instead of clothing.
Ryan Fenton
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I remember a prominent figure in nuclear power saying once, "If we can't be as cheap as coal then why bother?" That was Leslie Dewan, as I recall, though she may not have come up with it first.
I'll hear the claim that wind and solar are as cheap as coal. Assuming that is true then what of the storage needed to make it reliable? If wind and solar cannot be as reliable as coal then why bother?
Also, do you believe that storage technology will allow wind and solar to compete? I have my doubts. A common com
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Because you don't understand the chemistry of a simple Bosch Reaction? [wikipedia.org]
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Because you don't understand the chemistry of a simple Bosch Reaction? [wikipedia.org]
Everything I did in chem lab turned into a Botched Reaction. Course, everything I did in woodworking turned into sawdust. I got into software development because that and politics were the only options left where repeated failure was acceptable. I wasn't rich enough to be a politician.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 i
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We overproduce electricity by as much as 66% if you look at an energy flow diagram https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/co... [llnl.gov] you see that 25 quads were rejected out of 38 quads of electricity generated. Yet transmission loss is on the order of 5%. The rest of the rejected energy is overproduced.
In Washington they turn off windfarms and Microsoft wastes energy to meet its wholesale quota. We should be paid to use electricity.
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We overproduce electricity by as much as 66% if you look at an energy flow diagram https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/co... [llnl.gov] you see that 25 quads were rejected out of 38 quads of electricity generated. Yet transmission loss is on the order of 5%. The rest of the rejected energy is overproduced.
In Washington they turn off windfarms and Microsoft wastes energy to meet its wholesale quota. We should be paid to use electricity.
Uh, no. You don't understand the chart you linked to.
Rejected energy is NOT overproduction of electricity generated.
Rejected energy, in the chart you referred to, is mostly energy lost due to thermodynamic cycle efficiencies and heat loss due to design limitations. Think Carnot cycle, Rankine cycle, etc.
This has nothing to do with the periods of overproduction in wind farms (or solar).
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One problem with service jobs, aside from their dead-end (and frequently part-time or seasonal) nature, is that they require *other* people to have disposable income before you even HAVE service jobs. Once you're topheavy with service jobs, or when the economy takes a downturn, where does the money come from??
As to wind power, earlier today I tripped over this interesting set of charts:
https://stopthesethings.com/20... [stopthesethings.com]
Last winter I spoke to someone in Ontario whose home was blessed with electric heat. Their
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I understand that the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good
Before you can make that claim you need to consider if carbon capture can even be classified as "good". Outside of a small pilot here and there there's yet to be anything substantial to show this is even workable.
What there has been is the promise of carbon capture in return for government funding and subsidies then bankrupt projects that make away with billions leaving the stock standard but brand spanking new dirty coal in their wake.
Example: https://nextcity.org/features/... [nextcity.org]
Solar/Wind subsidies are still there (Score:2)
The budget includes everything anyone asked for (Score:4, Informative)
E.g. there's a shitload of extra cash for the military
https://www.politico.com/story... [politico.com]
Friday's pact, signed by President Donald Trump, adds $165 billion to the Pentagon budget over two years. That means the military will receive at least $1.4 trillion in total through September 2019 to help buy more fighter planes, ships and other equipment, boost the size of the ranks, and beef up training - a level of funding that seemed a long shot just months ago.
Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has long pushed for a $700 billion annual budget for the military, said in a statement that the agreement finally gives the Pentagon the "budget certainty it needs to begin the process of rebuilding the military."
"The deal is a huge win for defense hawks," said Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute. "The groundwork was being laid for years culminating in what I predict will be the peak year of defense spending since the last peak in 2010."
Basically the deal is that everyone gets what they want and the deficit goes through the stratosphere. GO USA!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And Rand Paul is considered an extremist for opposing it.
Re:The budget includes everything anyone asked for (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically the deal is that everyone gets what they want and the deficit goes through the stratosphere. GO USA!
So kind of like 2009, except for the everybody part?
Re:The budget includes everything anyone asked for (Score:5, Insightful)
one difference, in 09 we were on the verge of a collapse like the great depression. Now we are in moderate economic growth. During times like these is when you should start to prepare for the next downturn by reducing debt, not increasing it.
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So, please list us the bills that O did, that increased the debt by $10Trillion.
U can not. The reason is that most of that was done by the GOP under W and then the GOP refused to make cuts like we needed.
There is a huge difference (Score:2)
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http://www.janes.com/article/7... [janes.com]
The Obama administration planned to upgrade all legs of the âtriadâ(TM). This includes a new nuclear-capable Long Range Standoff (LRSO) cruise missile, 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) to replace the Ohio class, Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) to largely replace silo-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and new Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider long-range nuclear bombers.
The Trump administration will continue those efforts, plus add low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and a new nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM). Undersecretary of Defense for Policy John Rood told reporters the funding numbers for this new plan would not be revealed until the fiscal year 2019 budget is submitted later in February.
You can argue that the Columbia subs are necessary - the UK is doing the same thing [wikipedia.org]. I suppose the same argument applies replacing the Minutemen [nationalinterest.org]. The LRSO is basically an updated version of the ACM [wikipedia.org] - a missile the US deployed and then withdrew
And one of the justifications for the LRSO was that it has selectable yields, unlike other US nukes. However the new SLBMs and SLCM duplicate this. Actually the US did have nuclear SLCMs before but phased them out - there were nuclear
Just what we don't need (Score:2, Insightful)
These are all subsidies that go to big business and they are obsolete, ineffective technologies.
Nuclear just keeps getting more expensive. It's more expensive than coal, gas, solar, wind, geothermal, etc. It's inflexible and has nasty waste problems. The only people who like it are the big utilities since it lets them raise electricity rates.
Fuel cells are fool cells. The most inefficient way to generate electricity. There are no natural stores of H2 so you have to generate it using natural gas (good for fo
Re: Just what we don't need (Score:2)
Don't spend money on these obsolete technologies.
Spend money on solar, wind and storage.
Is that clear?