New Budget Reflects Inefficient Energy Priorities

An editorial in today's New York Times praising the energy priorities included in the President's latest budget is little more than a rubber stamp of a set of policies in serious need of rethinking. The goals the Times espouses, of "reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil and giving American workers a fighting chance in the global competition for clean-energy jobs", are perfectly fine; however, what's entirely absent is any critical assessment of whether the expensive programs they chose to highlight will contribute meaningfully to accomplishing them.

Start with the reauthorization of Treasury cash grants for renewable energy projects. A quick review of the Treasury's own tracking spreadsheet shows that 77% of the $10.4 billion awarded since 2009 under this program went to projects employing wind turbines, a mostly mature technology, half the value of which goes to offshore manufacturers, based on the American Wind Energy Association's own assessment. If the goal is putting Americans to work producing wind power hardware, this is a grossly inefficient way to do it. Moreover, this temporary program was instituted to fill the gap created when the market for "tax equity"--private transactions that exchange current cash for future tax credits--dried up during the financial crisis. Tax equity investors have recently been returning to the market, but they can't readily compete with free money from the Treasury Department. In other words, at this late date the Treasury cash grants are a solution to a problem that their continuation would help perpetuate.

Then there's the matter of the wind production tax credit, which I looked at in some detail recently. While I agree that it's neither fair nor appropriate to drop the industry off a cliff by allowing this benefit to expire all at once, it is high time that the 20-year-old tax credit for wind power be reduced to account for the maturity of onshore wind technology, and then gradually phased out on a firm schedule. The Times makes no mention of any of this.

It's also important to understand that whatever the technologies covered by these two programs may contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they don't save a barrel of imported oil, because the US generates less than 1% of our electricity from oil, and much of that in island or other remote locations that can't easily get reliable electricity through other means. That makes it doubly ironic that the only "subsidies" the Times opposes are the current tax benefits for oil and gas companies, arguably the only program mentioned in their editorial that actually does help reduce US imports of foreign oil.

The President's 2013 budget, which has little chance of adoption as proposed, includes a number of other energy provisions. Some of them are very worthy, including increased support for energy R&D that is too risky or long-term for industry to undertake on its own. However, it also includes an extension of the loan guarantee program that gave us Solyndra--a program that should not be renewed without much stronger oversight than the DOE has provided to date, beyond just hiring a "chief risk officer". It also mentions "enhancements to the existing electric vehicle tax incentive", a $7,500 per vehicle credit that benefits mostly higher-income taxpayers and does little to reduce either emissions or oil imports. What I don't see in these proposals is any recognition that many of the programs they seek to extend or expand have either outlived their usefulness or fallen short of delivering the benefits on which they were originally justified, and that every dollar spent inefficiently in this manner adds to our $1.3 trillion deficit, the necessary narrowing of which keeps getting pushed ever further into the future. The administration's latest energy priorities would have us spending as though it were still 2006.