AWEA - An update on the fight for a crucial wind policy

Although there’s bad news and good news — it all points to how critical your voice is going to continue to be in our fight for clean, homegrown energy.

As you may know, a few weeks ago, when Congress began negotiating the terms of a bill that could make a huge difference in bringing affordable wind power to American families in 2015, we launched a nationwide campaign to support it.

However, we weren’t the only ones reaching out to Congress. Anti-wind organizations have been fired up beyond any opposition we’ve seen before. They’ve been spending millions of dollars and writing messages to legislators urging them to leave wind policy out of this bill.

Late last week — we started to see the impact of our opponents’ attacks, and our own efforts to defend wind. By a vote of 378 to 46, the House voted to pass H.R. 5771, a bill that proposed to extend multiple tax incentives through the end of this year, including two common-sense energy policies – the production tax credit and investment tax credit.

The bad news is, this extension falls short of what we were pushing for. We wanted to see a two-year extension, which would make a huge difference in providing more clean and affordable energy to Americans than ever before.
 
The good news is — the voices of wind advocates in our Power of Wind network were heard, and helped preserve common-sense wind policies through this year. At a time when our opponents were fighting to eliminate wind policy, we powered through and gained at least an extension through this year of the wind policies vital for clean energy growth.

The fight is not yet done, and we’ve proven that we can counter the well-funded voices of the anti-wind movement. As the House bill is expected to move on to the Senate for consideration this week, our campaign will carry on to ensure that American families can benefit from some pretty exciting wind power trends:

• Wind power prices are coming down fast – In the past five years, the cost of wind power has dropped by over 50 percent—and is still decreasing!
   
• Wind is reaching more and more families – Wind power has delivered a third of all new generating capacity over the past five years, and a record amount of new projects are under construction.

Now we need to extend the value of wind power to more Americans, and quadruple the amount of electricity we make from wind by 2030 to meet the Wind Vision for America.

If you haven’t already, please sign up at PowerofWind.com to communicate with your elected representatives (we make it easy!), and join thousands of others in becoming part of the reason common-sense wind policy can carry on.