The $40B Awaitng Biden's DOE

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.

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