More than 150 groups urge congress to provide tax credits for energy storage projects

Published on March 25, 2021 by Dave Kovaleski

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More than 150 organizations are urging Congressional leaders for legislation that would make standalone storage projects eligible for the investment tax credit.

The letter, sent to leaders in both the Senate the House, was spearheaded by the U.S. Energy Storage Association and signed by various industry trade organizations, environmental advocacy groups, and small businesses.

In the letter, the groups said the tax credit “is a common-sense policy that would spur greater investment and create new jobs in the energy storage industry while extending the benefits of storage deployment among a wider diversity of technologies and industries. Those deployments, in turn, will accelerate the transition to clean energy, improve power system resilience, and position U.S. companies as leaders in globally competitive energy storage markets—exactly the reasons why the House of Representatives passed it last year as part of the Moving Forward Act.”

In March, Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Susan Collins (R-ME), and Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Mike Doyle (D-PA), and Vern Buchanan (R-FL) introduced the Energy Storage Tax Incentive and Deployment Act (S. 627/H.R. 1684) to remove limits on applying the tax credit to storage technologies when integrated with ITC-eligible solar projects.

“As the Biden Administration and Congress consider legislation to confront the climate crisis in economic recovery, we encourage you to support U.S. companies’ investment and jobs in making America’s power system more resilient, sustainable and affordable with energy storage. ITC eligibility for energy storage is among the nearest-term opportunities to advance clean energy in this Congress, and we encourage you to make passage a priority this year,” they wrote.