Advocacy Materials

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	Energy Storage – Maximizing Our Nation’s Energy Choices Energy storage companies, located in communities across the United States, can create skilled jobs if given a level playing field. We have been innovating for decades, starting with pumped hydropower storage and thermal storage and increasing our technologies with advanced batteries and flywheels. Our plants have created thousands of highly skilled jobs and have significant potential to spur additional job creation if the right policies are put in place. Our costs will come down as technology improves, but public policy needs to improve as well.
	Master Limited Partnerships and Energy Storage Bipartisan legislation (S. 3275) that would open up Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) to transmission, storage and generation from renewable resources has been introduced by Senators Christopher Coons (D-DE) and Jerry Moran (R-KS). A House companion bill is under consideration as well. Master Limited Partnerships typically attract more capital investment, lowering the cost to develop the sector and increasing available equity. MLP is a designation for company structure—dictating how a company is operated and taxed—that is considered a “pass through structure”. MLPs are widely used and deliver billions of dollars of growth capital to sectors that qualify. To date, only fossil fuel development has been able to take advantage of this tax structure; renewable energy is excluded from the statute. Access to capital has been a chronic issue for the deployment of renewable energy technologies; this bill can correct that problem.
	Clean Energy Financing Act of 2011: Benefits to the Storage Industry The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approved S. 1510, co-sponsored by Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Ranking Member Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a bill that creates a Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) to finance the development and deployment of innovative breakthrough clean energy technologies. CEDA directly addresses the primary challenge in developing innovative energy technologies – obtaining adequate to finance promising ideas from inception, to small pilot projects, to large commercial scale applications. The legislation would provide critical and needed support for the energy storage industry.
	ESA/AWEA Joint Principles for Clean Energy Both ESA and AWEA have strongly advocated for public policies that level the playing field and remove barriers to market entry for clean energy technologies, allowing them to compete with traditional energy resources. The jointly agreed‐upon principles recognize the value of energy storage across the utility industry, the benefit of storage as a source of ancillary services, and the need to strategically utilize storage on wind farms.