PHOTON International The Photovoltaic Magazine

Solar hangs in balance as US energy bill heads to conference

On April 25, the US Senate overwhelmingly passed its version of a major energy bill with a number of benefits for solar. The bill now goes to a Senate-House conference committee to merge it with the House version, passed in Aug. 2001.

The main battle is expected to be over Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The House supported President George W. Bush's proposal to allow oil drilling in ANWR, while the Senate shot it down. Glenn Hamer, chairman of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the industry lobby group, expects the committee will go through an »arduous process,« with a final vote close to the end of the congressional year, probably in December.

In a head-to-head comparison, the House bill is not as PV-friendly as the Senate version. While both still include a 15 percent solar tax credit, the House version, H.R. 4, is only for five years, two years less than in Senate Bill 596. In addition, the Senate bill has a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), which sets a 10 percent production target by 2019 with double credit for net-metered renewables (see PI 4/2002, p. 23). »The intention is to provide distributed renewables - particularly peak shavers like PV - with some sort of incentive to spur production,« say Hamer. But he expects the language to be watered down in conference, especially since the House bill does not contain an RPS at all. The Senate version also includes a federal net-metering standard, which would guarantee interconnection agreements for systems up to 500 kW. While the Senate bill would reform federal electricity laws, Hamer says the House version doesn't even contain an electricity title.

Unlike the House version, which only has a production tax credit (PTC) of $0.015 per kilowatt-hour for wind, the Senate bill contains an extension of the PTC to solar, indexed to $0.017 for inflation. »The PTC is what drives the wind market in this country,« says Hamer, who believes it would very useful for decreasing the costs of central stations for solar.