Governors' Wind Energy Coalition

The House plan to cut the wind energy tax credit may have been dealt a fatal blow as three Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee have come out against the idea.

Nevada Senator Dean Heller said he didn’t support it and Senator John Thune of South Dakota said he plans to stick to the terms of a 2015 agreement to phase out the incentive.

“We think that issue has been dealt with,” he told Ari Natter. And we all know how Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican who created the tax credit in 1992 feels about the issue. He has reportedly told a conference he’d let the credit be killed off “over my dead body.”

“You don’t have to mess with wind at all, it’s being transitioned out,” Grassley said.

There are likely more Republican tax writers who support the credit, such as Pat Roberts of windy Kansas, who when approached for comment simply said he’d been instructed not to talk about it. (This raises an interesting question: Who can tell a senator not to talk?)

As our friends at ClearView Energy write, “We regard the PTC proposal as possible negotiating collateral for a potentially contentious House-Senate reconciliation of very different tax reform bills, and we do not expect it to survive in its current form.”