$3-4 Trillion Infrastructure Plan Will Be Revealed in 5 Days

Fixing and building roads, bridges, rail lines, ports and the electric grid could account for nearly $1 trillion of Biden’s forthcoming Build Back Better infrastructure program. The overall US infrastructure program is expected to be in the $3 to 4 trillion range. There will a first official release of information starting Wednesday, March 31, 2021.

There will also be climate change and clean energy-related spending. There is expected to be support and spending for the electric grid, energy-efficient affordable housing, electric vehicle charging stations, and other clean energy priorities.

The stated goal is to buy and enable new technologies and clean energy hardware to decarbonize the US electricity system by 2035.

There has been talk about a $50 per ton carbon tax.

There is an expectation that many elements of a prior Green Act will be in the bill.

A specific package with four key components is likely:

Tech-neutral tax credits for new clean capacity: An ITC of 30% or a PTC at $25/MWH (67% higher than the current wind PTC) is available for any zero emitting capacity that enters into service before the end of 2031. Fossil capacity with carbon capture, including new retrofits, qualify and get a discounted credit depending on the level of capture. Developers can choose the ITC or PTC, whichever suits them best.

Existing coal retirement incentive: Any coal plant owned by a rural cooperative can have its federal Rural Utility Service loans written off if the plant is retired by the end of 2025 and the energy is replaced with clean generation. We estimate that up to 30 GW of coal could be eligible, which wouldn’t retire under current policy. These plants have an associated outstanding federal debt of roughly $10 billion.

Existing clean retention incentive: An incentive is available for any existing nuclear capacity to stay online at least through 2031. The incentive can be made available to all generators or scaled based on need, similar to a recent proposal by Senators Whitehouse and Barrasso. We assume the incentive is sufficient to prevent roughly 50 GW of economic nuclear retirements that we see in our current policy scenario.

Extension of carbon capture incentives: New and retrofitted fossil plants equipped with carbon capture that enter into service by the end of 2031 can claim the section 45Q carbon capture tax credit of $50/ton if coupled with storage and $35/ton if coupled with utilization or EOR. Developers cannot claim both this and the tech neutral credit.

They will also add in specific climate pollution regulations to accelerate the retirement of coal plants.

They will add in specific investment into solar and wind.

SOURCES – Rhodium Group, Smart Cities
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

12 thoughts on “$3-4 Trillion Infrastructure Plan Will Be Revealed in 5 Days”

  1. US gorverment can print money many they want and people around the world are want to keep it. The greenbuck are the most precious worst more than gold.

  2. We need nuclear and an adult effort to do solar from space. Wind farms and solar are failures generally because they can't do baseload by definition. The greens offer failures that require massive subsidies to compete and even then there are still no grid scale storage solutions. 

    Repeat. NO GRID SCALE STORAGE.

    If you want the republicans to join and help, the path is simple: do something sane for a change. Invent GRID SCALE STORAGE. We'll talk.

  3. 'Extending nuclear plant life can be a mistake, their life was to be 30 years by design.' When they were built nobody knew how long steel could survive neutron bombardment – projected lifespan was just a guess. Since then, they've tested pieces of reactor vessel steel in research reactors, and are confident in extending certification to eighty years. ( Many of the reactors have also had power upgrades of twenty percent or more, and their capacity factor has gone up from about 60% to 93.5% for the whole fleet. Because of this, even though a number of reactors have been prematurely retired, total production is higher than it's ever been.) In Russia, they've developed a technique for annealing out the neutron damage to the reactor vessel in situ. Everything else can be replaced, so until something better and cheaper comes along, reactor's could theoretically last indefinitely.

  4. Please, let it be… and be replaced by wind, solar, sea wave harvesting technology, and whatever else is out there as long as it's renewable.

  5. Actually I’ve seen what over investment in highway systems does to a city… can anybody honestly say they like the highway systems in Texas? Or the extra ezpass loop they put around DC under Biden’s last infrastructure revitalization push under Obama? It’s just insane over building … nobody wants 10 lane highways… and or insane highway infrastructure like in Texas…it doesn’t even make sense…

  6. Better idea, setup a government program that prints money and gives home owners back the value of their home so they can teardown and rebuild their home if it’s over 50 years old unless it’s marked as historic..specifically in areas where they keep increasing the price of homes and sucking away peoples money to rebuild… example the $1,000,000 shack in San franciso that’s as nice as a $50,000 house in West Virginia… ridiculous….

  7. I think electrical generation with an emphasis on capacitive generation (solar) while shuttering inductive generation may prove disasterous. I think you need large base loaded plants to ensure a stable grid, wind and solar can come and go but you need stability. Extending nuclear plant life can be a mistake, their life was to be 30 years by design. New nuclear, new hydro, new combine cycle gas turbines that will ensure grid stability. We also need research in increasing the efficiency of air conditioning and heating of both water and air.

  8. Market forces like fracking natural gas and solar panels are killing coal, not the Democratic Party. That's why coal fired plants closed at even higher rates when Trump was president even though he tried to protect them. Honestly, considering the decades when the coal plant operators refused to filter the mercury spewing from their smoke stacks and poisoning everything I say good riddance.

  9. Yeah, holding my breath. Our dysfunctional political system will f it up no matter how desperately the country needs it or how good it would be for our citizens.
    Instead of focusing on electrifying the grid, cleaning our power generation systems, increasing power generation, fixing infrastructure and making us safer our Democrats cannot help but to use verbiage guaranteed to set off the Republicans. Social justice, climate change remediation, etc. guaranteeing that there will be no bipartisan support.
    It wouldn't matter anyway. The Republican Party will block anything and everything the Democratic Party wants to do no matter how good it would be for red states or anyone really. At this point helping the Democratic Party do anything successful will be seen as treason by their base.
    It is entirely possible China will supplant us as the richest and most powerful country in the world. We will have nobody to blame for that but ourselves.

Comments are closed.