Full Title: Beyond Boom & Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence
Author(s): Jesse Jenkins, Mark Muro, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Letha Tawney, Alex Trembath
Publisher(s): N/A
Publication Date: April 1, 2012
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
In the absence of significant and timely energy policy reform, the recent boom in US clean tech sectors could falter.
Driven by private innovation and entrepreneurship as well as critical public sector support in the form of tax credits, grants, and loan guarantees, several clean energy technology (or “clean tech”) segments have grown robustly in recent years while making progress on cost and performance.
Renewable electricity generation doubled from 2006 to 2011, construction is under way on the nation’s first new nuclear power plants in decades, and American manufacturers have regained market share in advanced batteries and vehicles. Prices for solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies fell, while employment in clean tech sectors expanded by almost 12 percent from 2007 to 2010, adding more than 70,000 jobs even during the height of the recession.
Despite this recent success, however, nearly all clean tech segments in the United States remain reliant on production and deployment subsidies or other supportive policies to gain an expanding foothold in today’s energy markets. Now, many of these subsidies and policies are poised to expire—with substantial implications for the clean tech industry.
This report aims to take stock of the coming changes to federal clean tech subsidies and programs (Part 1); examine their likely impact on key clean tech market segments (Part 2); and chart a course of policy reform that can advance the US clean tech industry beyond today’s policy-induced cycle of boom and bust (Part 3).
Along the way, this report provides a comprehensive analysis of the spending trajectory of 92 distinct federal policies and programs supporting clean tech sectors over the 2009 to 2014 period. As this analy- sis illustrates, an era of heightened clean energy spending supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) is now coming to an end, coinciding with the expiration of several additional time-delimited tax credits and programs. As a result, key portions of the clean tech industry can now anticipate substantially reduced federal support.