Cleantech Goes to Washington: Doerr, Google Sign On
As the presidential candidates learn to speak the language of cleantech, green investors are using their political voices. VC legend John Doerr, Google’s Green Energy Czar William Wiehl, and more than 350 others from the cleantech, academic, venture capital, energy and nonprofit worlds have signed a letter addressed to the House of Representatives and Senate leaders urging them to renew energy legislation that’s helping to keep greentech projects alive.
The Production Tax Credit (PTC) and the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) are set to expire before the end of the year; the group of letter signers wants them to be renewed by March 1.
The time is now for the United States to enhance and sustain policy priorities to prevent immediate and long-term interruptions in the renewable energy sector.
Not familiar with the alphabet soup of green legislation? The PTC subsidizes energy produced from a variety of renewable sources, while the ITC allows businesses to get tax credits for investments in clean technologies. The problem is that both the ITC and PTC are never renewed for more than a year or two at a time, so the risk of them lapsing is always around the corner.
And the PTC was actually snipped out of the Senate’s economic stimulus package last week. While most think both will be renewed before their expiration, this legislative purgatory has many entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on edge. Especially since renewing the ITC and PTC for another year won’t be enough.
The Democrats’ new energy plan could help, but if the U.S. government wants the country to be the leader in clean technology, it will have to provide a more stable, certain regulatory environment to enable these businesses to make long-term investments and embark on long-term projects. Otherwise, Doerr and his Sand Hill Road compatriots might start investing more of their cleantech money outside of the U.S.
[...] letter doesn’t carry the same signatory venture capital celebrities and techno gurus found on the letter from the American Council on Renewable Energy earlier this month. It does, however, count a number of prominent renewable energy lobbyist groups [...]
Green energy is definitely the best solution in most cases. Technology like solar energy, wind power, fuel cells, zaps electric vehicles, EV hybrids, etc have come so far recently. Green energy even costs way less than oil and gas in many cases.
[...] cleantech breakthroughs, the country’s legislatures are facing stagnation. There’s the languishing renewable energy tax credit extension, the California Resource Board’s deteriorating zero-emission vehicle program, and this week [...]
[...] answer the pleas of the cleantech industry and already missed a deadline on March 1 called for by a letter from John Doerr, Google’s Green Energy Czar William Wiehl and 350 others in [...]