The parent company of a Florida energy company seeking to build a wind farm in Fayette County is among the country’s biggest recipients of federal subsidies and tax credits, according to a report released earlier this week.
Good Jobs First, a non-profit, non-partisan research center based in Washington, D.C., released its “Uncle Sam's Favorite Corporations” report Monday, which analyzed to whom, and how much in, federal grants and tax credits have been awarded.
The report indicates that roughly two-thirds of the approximate $68 billion given out by the federal government, over the last 15 years, has been doled out to large corporations, one of those being NextEra Energy of Juno Beach, Fla. – the parent company of NextEra Energy Resources, which is spearheading the Whitewater Wind Farm project in Fayette County.
NextEra Energy, according to the report, has received 41 awards during that period totaling $1.93 billion in federal subsidies since 2000, in addition to a little over $75 million in subsidies at the state and local level – resulting in roughly $2.3 billion the company received.
Those subsidies included federal grants, property tax abatements – such as what Fayette County officials granted NextEra Energy Resources earlier this year – tax credits and rebates, and training reimbursements.
In fact, when it comes to federal subsidies, according to the report, NextEra Energy was the second-highest recipient in the United States of federal grants and tax credits since 2000, trailing only Iberdrola, a Spanish energy company which received roughly $2.2 billion. It was also one of only six parent companies in the U.S. to receive more than $1 billion in such subsidies.
“We now see that big business dominates federal subsidy spending the way it does state and local programs,” said Philip Mattera, the report’s main author, in a statement Monday.
Sarah Gatewood, a spokesperson with NextEra Energy, told the South Florida Business Journal earlier this week that the company had used the subsidies to invest more than $1 billion in green energy and create hundreds of full-time jobs, in addition to hundreds of construction jobs – the purpose of why the subsidies were created.
Those subsidies might not be going away, either, as a report earlier this month by the U.S. Department of Energy expects wind power – such as what would be created by the Whitewater Wind Farm – to supply roughly 10 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020, more than double what it currently does today.
That report, “Wind Vision: A New Era of Wind Power in the United States,” also states that wind power could provide up to 35 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2050, along with creating about 600,000 new jobs in the process.
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