Welcome to your Friday Rundown for the week ending April 13. Feedback is always welcome at info@clearpathaction.org. 
 

ICYMI: CONGRESS APPROVED NUCLEAR BREAKTHROUGH   

It’s understandable to lose track of every nook and cranny in the massive budget deal Congress recently approved, including an important revision and extension of a key carbon capture incentive (more on that HERE).

But embedded in that deal was another update to the tax code too important to overlook. In fact, it is the most impactful congressional action to propel the future of nuclear energy in more than a decade.

ClearPath’s in-house nuclear guru Spencer Nelson breaks down the significance of this bipartisan fix to the 45J nuclear production tax credit, which will not only help complete the AP1000 reactor expansion at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle but is also essential to helping next-generation small modular reactors and other more advanced technologies.

Spencer also explains why this 45J fix alone is likely insufficient to spur those advanced technologies. Among other needed steps: Securing a steady domestic uranium source, Nuclear Regulatory Commission reform, a fast-spectrum test reactor user facility, moonshot technology demonstration goals, indirect financing and a solution to nuclear waste storage.

READ SPENCER’S TAKE
 

SENATE EPW TOUTS NEW BIPARTISAN CARBON CAPTURE PLAN 

In advance of potential committee action, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing on the bipartisan USE IT Act (S. 2602), which would support carbon capture technologies through public-private partnerships, CO2 pipeline and other infrastructure improvements and R&D.

EPW Chairman John Barrasso, lead sponsor of the bill, said he would work with lead co-sponsor Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) to ensure any amendments on the “promising” measure would be “built on bipartisan consensus” as it winds through the committee and broader Congress. It is a sequel from the same quartet of senators who led the FUTURE Act, which extended and further fixed the 45Q carbon capture tax incentive and was signed into law as part of the budget deal. “It was a huge milestone for us,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (D-W.Va.) said of the bill sponsored by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.). “We’re now looking to the second phase to make sure that this technology can make it out to the field.”
 

FURTHER READING: BARRASSO-WHITEHOUSE BILL CALLED “CRITICAL” – E&E NEWS 

PERRY TO TOUT U.S. CARBON CAPTURE TECH IN INDIA

Energy Secretary Rick Perry said he will tout the potential of exporting U.S. carbon capture technologies in a trip beginning Friday in India. The conversation will center on India’s continued growth in buying U.S. technologies to innovate their energy sector and carbon capture “will be part of that,” Perry responded to Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) at a Senate Energy and Water Appropriations FY19 budget hearing. “We want it to be U.S.-based resources as often as possible but we also want it to be as clean burning as it can be,” Perry said.

Hoeven touted efforts in his state, including Project Tundra, which would retrofit an existing coal facility with carbon capture technologies. “This is the real solution. Not over regulation [but] technology and innovation,” Hoeven said.
 

CHINA IS “BEATING OUR BRAINS OUT” ON BATTERY STORAGE

China is “beating our brains out” in accelerating battery technologies, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) noted at the same hearing. Perry acknowledged that China is a “heck of a competitor” but that his department’s national labs “are what are going to keep us in the game.”

“The answers will be found with our universities and our national labs working together on battery storage,” Perry said.
 

NEWS NUGGETS

Perry this week also announced a request for proposals worth up to $1.8 billion to develop at least two new exascale supercomputers to be deployed at national labs by 2023. These could help identify next-generation materials and accelerate industrial product designs and reduce cost-to-market. ENERGY.GOV 

ClearPath Action joined 90-plus groups and universities in asking appropriators to fund ARPA-E at $375 million or more in FY19. “ARPA-E plays a unique and critical role in maintaining America’s global leadership in energy technologies,” the letter states. ARPA-E is a “highly innovative and effective program which enjoys strong bipartisan congressional support,” it adds. READ THE LETTER 

Ten teams from the U.S., China, India, Canada and Scotland are finalists for the $20 million NRG Cosia Carbon XPRIZE, a 4-year global competition to advance breakthrough technologies to convert carbon emissions from power plants to useful products. Five of those teams will compete to demonstrate conversion of CO2 emissions at a coal-fired power plant in Gillette, Wy. BUSINESS WIRE

The annual global energy storage market will be 8.6 GW and 21.6 GWh by 2022, according to a new GTM Research report. The U.S. is expected to stay at the forefront of the global market through 2022 but China will grow to be the second-largest market in 2019.

SPEED READ

THE PATH AHEAD