The $40B Awaitng Biden’s DOE

Energy, Federal Agency, Funding/Financing/Investing, Opinions, Policy, White House

January 4, 2021

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by Kelsey Tamborrino (Politico’s Morning Energy) Biden, who oversaw the Obama administration’s stimulus work as vice president, could utilize a pot of $40 billion in unused Energy Department loan authority awarded under the 2009 stimulus to kick start his climate and infrastructure plan, POLITICO’s Zack Colman reports.

DOE’s loan program helped a raft of clean energy companies deploy projects across the country during the early Obama years. But it became a political target after solar company Solyndra collapsed, defaulting on more than $500 million in federal loans — even though the overall program had a far better default rate than than private lenders typically experience, according to a Bipartisan Policy Center analysis. That loan capacity had been neglected by the Trump administration.

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Now, advocates say the incoming Biden administration could simply tweak the loan program’s language to make it the backbone of a government-wide clean lending bank that enables the rapid deployment of new innovations, like the installation of batteries and other energy storage technology to support the growth of renewable power. “There’s a lot that you can do with the money that’s sitting at DOE,” said Dan Reicher, who ran DOE’s energy efficiency and renewable energy office under President Bill Clinton. READ MORE

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