President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget asks Congress to increase spending on renewable-energy projects by about $500 million—almost the same amount the Energy Department lost on its failed loan guarantee to the bankrupt solar company Solyndra.
The proposed spending increase, which would take the Energy Department’s renewable spending up to $2.3 billion, compared with $1.8 billion in 2012—is a clear signal that Obama plans to push ahead with full-throated support of clean energy on the campaign trail, despite the Solyndra controversy.
That bump up is part of an overall increase in the Energy Department’s top-line request of $27.2 billion, up 3.2 percent from fiscal 2012.
“In light of the tight discretionary spending caps, this increase in funding is significant and a testament to the importance of innovation and clean energy in the country’s economic future,” the department wrote in its request.
Practically, though, the new clean-energy spending is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill, where election-year partisan deadlock has all but assured that Congress won’t even pass a budget this year. And even if it did, the Republican-controlled House would be sure to attack any fresh Energy Department spending on renewable programs.
Republican Ed Whitfield of Kentucky, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Energy and Power Subcommittee, offered a preview of the proposal’s reception on his panel.
“The president delivered his 2013 budget to Congress today with more of the same failed policies he has pushed for three years,” Whitfield said. “This budget will increase taxes, does not provide a path to debt reduction, and will once again increase spending on failed renewable energy policies.”
It’s worth noting that while Obama was bold enough to ask for new clean-energy spending in the wake of the Solyndra controversy, the White House didn’t go so far as to ask for an increase in the same loan-guarantee program that backed Solyndra. The request for that program is cut from $2.1 billion to $1.7 billion. Instead, the funding will boost research programs; the agency’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program, which supports private-sector endeavors to research breakthrough energy technologies; and relatively noncontroversial programs such as efforts to boost energy efficiency in buildings and manufacturing.
Obama also asked for a boost in clean-energy spending in another corner of the budget—the Pentagon. The Defense Department asks for $1 billion for energy-conservation investments, up from $400 million in 2010, which would go toward energy-efficient retrofits of buildings and development of renewable-energy projects.
While Obama’s boost in proposed clean-energy spending may seem bold in face of the rain of criticism he knows will come from House Republicans, it represent a deeply scaled-down vision of his once-ambitious clean-energy agenda. Campaigning for office in 2008, Obama proposed a sweeping energy plan that would have budgeted $150 billion over a decade in federal clean-energy spending. By comparison, clean-energy advocates say that this year’s relatively paltry proposals won’t come close to scaling up the nation’s clean-energy economy to the size once envisioned by the Obama White House.
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