Federal and State Tax on IBI or CBI in SAM

It looks like currently SAM does not apply federal and state taxes on invesment based incentive (IBI), or capacity based incentive (CBI). Is there a way to have SAM apply federal and state taxes on this. In the real world many utility incentives are taxable at the federal and state level. 

Hello,

The IBI and CBI incentives' effect on federal, state, and depreciation calculations are controlled by the check boxes on the Incentives page.

To see how those inputs in the user interface map to SSC variables, you can use the inputs browser (File, Inputs Browser). The naming convention is as follows, using the Federal IBI as an example:

ibi_fed_percent (%)
The size of the federal IBI incentive as a percentage of the total installed cost.

ibi_fed_percent_maxvalue ($)
The upper limit of the federal IBI incentive in dollars.

ibi_fed_percent_deprbas_fed (0/1)
The federal IBI specified as a percentage reduces the depreciation basis for federal tax.

ibi_fed_percent_deprbas_sta (0/1)
The federal IBI specified as a percentage reduces the depreciation basis for federal tax.

ibi_fed_percent_tax_fed (0/1)
The federal IBI specified as a percentage is federally taxable.

ibi_fed_percent_tax_sta (0/1)
The federal IBI specified as a percentage is state taxable.

I see that the labels for those variables are missing, so will add an issue to the SAM GitHub repository to fix those: github.com/NREL/SAM/issues/403 .

Best regards,
Paul.

Paul:
Many thanks



How do these inputs work? When it says 
"The federal IBI specified as a percentage is federally taxable."
So if I specify 100% or 1 as input, does SAM treat entire IBI as a taxable amount?

There are two different flavors of the IBI: One that you specify as a dollar amount (ibi_fed_amount) and one that you specify as a percentage of the total installed cost (ibi_fed_percent).

The examples I provided are for the ibi_fed_percent option, so ibi_fed_percent_tax_fed = 1 means that 100% percent of the IBI specified as a percentage of total installed cost is federally taxable. Similarly, ibi_fed_amount_tax_fed = 1 means that 100% of the IBI specified as an amount is federally taxable.

This makes a little more sense when you see the variables laid out on the Incentives page in SAM:



Best regards,
Paul.