Bingaman: Use payroll-tax cut bill to extend green energy credits

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is pressing lawmakers negotiating extension of the payroll tax cut to include several clean-energy tax credits in the package.

The senator used an op-ed in The Hill to call the payroll bill the best chance to extend credits for renewable electricity projects (which expire at year’s end), and homeowner efficiency incentives and green energy project grants that lapsed already.

From his item:

Congress has few opportunities to address this issue this year. The most promising opportunity is the current payroll tax conference between the Senate and the House. This group of lawmakers should not consider its job done until it has found a way to extend the job-creating credits that expired at the end of 2011, and to proactively extend the credits that will expire at the end of 2012.

Bingaman argues that lawmakers must act fast and makes the economic case for the incentives. 

“If we do not extend the production tax credit for wind by the end of the first quarter of this year, we will start to see lost jobs, slowed momentum and idled U.S. factories,” Bingaman writes. “Vestas, one of the largest wind turbine manufacturers in the country, already has announced that if Congress fails to extend the tax credit immediately, it will be forced to lay off 1,600 U.S. workers, and the major project developers have no projects planned for 2013.”

The piece more broadly makes the case that “clean energy plays an important role in creating new jobs and greater energy production.”

Bingaman’s column is among several energy-themed op-eds from senior lawmakers running in The Hill today. Check them out here.