Washington — The Treasury Department and the IRS today have issued guidance (Notice 2006-26) on the certification that homeowners may rely on when they claim credits for purchases that make their homes more efficient.
During 2006, individuals can make energy-conscious purchases that will provide tax benefits when filling out their tax returns next year. The credit will also be available for purchases in 2007. Manufacturers offering energy efficient items such as insulation or storm windows can assure their customers that their energy efficient items will qualify for the tax credit if certain energy efficiency requirements are met.
A recent tax law change provides a tax credit to improve the energy efficiency of existing homes. The law provides a 10 percent credit for buying qualified energy efficiency improvements. To qualify, a component must meet or exceed the criteria established by the 2000 International Energy Conservation Code (including supplements) and must be installed in the taxpayer’s main home in the United States.
The following items are eligible:
Insulation systems that reduce heat loss/gain
Exterior windows (including skylights)
Exterior doors
Metal roofs (meeting applicable Energy Star requirements).
In addition, the law provides a credit for costs relating to residential energy property expenses. To qualify as residential energy property, the property must meet certification requirements prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury and must be installed in the taxpayer’s main home in the United States.
The following items are eligible:
$50 for each advanced main air circulating fan
$150 for each qualified natural gas, propane, or oil furnace or hot water boiler
$300 for each item of qualified energy efficient property.
The maximum credit for all taxable years is $500 – no more than $200 of the credit can be attributable to expenses for windows.
Additionally, the new law makes a credit available to those who add qualified solar panels, solar water heating equipment, or a fuel cell power plant to their homes in the United States. In general, a qualified fuel cell power plant converts a fuel into electricity using electrochemical means, has an electricity–only generation efficiency of more than 30 percent and generates at least 0.5 kilowatts of electricity.
Taxpayers are allowed one credit equal to 30 percent of the qualified investment in a solar panel up to a maximum credit of $2,000, and another equivalent credit for investing in a solar water heating system. No part of either system can be used to heat a pool or hot tub.
Additionally, taxpayers are also allowed a 30 percent tax credit for the purchase of qualified fuel cell power plants. The credit may not exceed $500 for each .5 kilowatt of capacity.
These items must be placed in service after Dec. 31, 2005 and before Jan. 1, 2008.
IR-2006-34, Feb. 21, 2006
Showing posts with label SOLAR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SOLAR. Show all posts
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Reality is Catching Up to US...
The Desperation of George W. Bush
2007-02-08 by Chris Nelder
"... after a career spent casting doubt on global warming science and favoring Big Oil at all times and at all costs, President Bush changed his tune in his recent State of the Union speech, claiming that new energy technologies "will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.""
"The reality is that Bush & Co. are in a state of quiet desperation, slowly and deliberately making partially misleading, partially true statements to show that they know the truth about oil and global warming without it actually costing them too much politically, and without having to actually do anything differently....
"They're just trying to get out ahead of the issues so they don't get crushed by them..."
The first reason is simply that the world's number-one oil field, Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, is in decline....
"And we now know that our second largest oilfield, Mexico's Cantarell, is in a catastrophic 28% annual decline. The U.S.'s number-two source of imports could be finished in less than four years.
"Last month the Bush administration sent a team from the Department of Energy to meet with Canada's natural resources agency, to ask them to bypass environmental rules in order to ramp up production from oil sands by a factor of five . . . even though, as has been well recognized already, they have neither the natural gas nor the fresh water to do it.
"...The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its much-anticipated report. Three years in the making, the report is the most comprehensive, global and peer-reviewed study on climate change ever written, bringing together the work of more than 800 scientists, more than 450 lead authors from more than 130 countries and more than 2,500 expert reviewers.
In short, it's humanity's best try at getting the story right.
And the report said greenhouse gas emissions will continue to change the climate over the next 100 years, causing sea levels to rise by a half-meter. Millions will be displaced from their coastal and low-lying communities, causing waves of environmental refugees. Snow in the mountains will disappear, desertification will intensify, oceans will die-and so will people, due to deadly heat waves, as world temps rise by some 3 to 5.8 degrees Celsius....
In the GMO Quarterly Letter 2007, Jeremy Grantham had a sharply worded essay titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006-A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data." He wrote:
Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change, and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain. In fact, we have spent the last large chunk of time in this country with a strong bias to feel-good data at the expense of accurate, hard data in this field. This attitude seems to be reflected in the spin on U.S. economic success, which we've commented on several times, exaggerating, sometimes substantially, the absolute and relative performance of the U.S. economy. It has certainly been reflected in the general desire for environmental issues to be benign and optimistic or to simply go away. [ . . . ]
The U.S. policy approach to climate change (and other environmental issues) has been similarly casual in its unwillingness to plan for the long term. There is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures [ . . . ] Yet the U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company). This campaign has used and reused the solitary plausible academic they can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field, plus one famous novelist-without qualifications in the field, but, still, for heaven's sake, widely quoted by the administration-and one Danish economist who really doesn't get Pascal's Paradox, but does seem to have shares in The Wall Street Journal.
Clearly, Team Bush is desperate to get on the right side of the climate change issue.
This is only the first half of our case. We'll explore the second half next week.
Until then . . .
-Chris Nelder
Scary, is it not. Now is the time to begin to use every means to use solar energy.
ALAN
2007-02-08 by Chris Nelder
"... after a career spent casting doubt on global warming science and favoring Big Oil at all times and at all costs, President Bush changed his tune in his recent State of the Union speech, claiming that new energy technologies "will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change.""
"The reality is that Bush & Co. are in a state of quiet desperation, slowly and deliberately making partially misleading, partially true statements to show that they know the truth about oil and global warming without it actually costing them too much politically, and without having to actually do anything differently....
"They're just trying to get out ahead of the issues so they don't get crushed by them..."
The first reason is simply that the world's number-one oil field, Saudi Arabia's Ghawar, is in decline....
"And we now know that our second largest oilfield, Mexico's Cantarell, is in a catastrophic 28% annual decline. The U.S.'s number-two source of imports could be finished in less than four years.
"Last month the Bush administration sent a team from the Department of Energy to meet with Canada's natural resources agency, to ask them to bypass environmental rules in order to ramp up production from oil sands by a factor of five . . . even though, as has been well recognized already, they have neither the natural gas nor the fresh water to do it.
"...The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its much-anticipated report. Three years in the making, the report is the most comprehensive, global and peer-reviewed study on climate change ever written, bringing together the work of more than 800 scientists, more than 450 lead authors from more than 130 countries and more than 2,500 expert reviewers.
In short, it's humanity's best try at getting the story right.
And the report said greenhouse gas emissions will continue to change the climate over the next 100 years, causing sea levels to rise by a half-meter. Millions will be displaced from their coastal and low-lying communities, causing waves of environmental refugees. Snow in the mountains will disappear, desertification will intensify, oceans will die-and so will people, due to deadly heat waves, as world temps rise by some 3 to 5.8 degrees Celsius....
In the GMO Quarterly Letter 2007, Jeremy Grantham had a sharply worded essay titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006-A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data." He wrote:
Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change, and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain. In fact, we have spent the last large chunk of time in this country with a strong bias to feel-good data at the expense of accurate, hard data in this field. This attitude seems to be reflected in the spin on U.S. economic success, which we've commented on several times, exaggerating, sometimes substantially, the absolute and relative performance of the U.S. economy. It has certainly been reflected in the general desire for environmental issues to be benign and optimistic or to simply go away. [ . . . ]
The U.S. policy approach to climate change (and other environmental issues) has been similarly casual in its unwillingness to plan for the long term. There is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures [ . . . ] Yet the U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company). This campaign has used and reused the solitary plausible academic they can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field, plus one famous novelist-without qualifications in the field, but, still, for heaven's sake, widely quoted by the administration-and one Danish economist who really doesn't get Pascal's Paradox, but does seem to have shares in The Wall Street Journal.
Clearly, Team Bush is desperate to get on the right side of the climate change issue.
This is only the first half of our case. We'll explore the second half next week.
Until then . . .
-Chris Nelder
Scary, is it not. Now is the time to begin to use every means to use solar energy.
ALAN
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