Professor Dan Reichers explains how a long-term extension of tax credits for solar projects “has serious political challenges” with The New York Times' Diane Cardwell. 

For more than a year now, an enormous solar thermal power plant has been humming along in the Arizona desert, sending out power as needed, even well after sunset. The plant, called Solana, was developed by the Spanish energy and technology company Abengoa and has succeeded in meeting an elusive solar goal — producing electricity when the sun is not shining — and displacing fossil-fuel-based power in the grid.

“With the sun going down at 6 or 7 o’clock at night, all the other forms of solar production are essentially going to zero,” said Brad Albert, general manager for resource management at Arizona Public Service, the state’s main utility, “while Solana is still producing at full power capability. It just adds a whole lot of value to us because our customer demand is so high even after the sun goes down.”

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Dan W. Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University, who has been urging that approach, said that the Obama administration was also taking input on ways to phase out the credit that might give the industry “a smoother glide path” toward its elimination.

“Could you have a gradual, multiyear phaseout of this from 30 to zero, instead of a cliff next year from 30 down to 10, and then 10 continues indefinitely?” he said, adding that a long-term extension of the credit “has serious political challenges these days.”

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