President Biden’s new Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is poised to lose $ 40 billion in Department of Energy loans, the former Michigan governor told CERAWeek on Wednesday.
Granholm has selected Jigar Shah, founder of SunEdison, to head the loan program as director of the Loan Program Office.
The DoE loan program has been in existence for years and is responsible, according to IHS Markit, for supporting the top five U.S. utility-scale solar projects in the United States. More blatantly, the DoE loan program is also credited with scattering $ 528 million to Solyndra, the solar panel maker that went bankrupt two years after receiving DoE funding.
The program, originally created in 2005 under U.S. President Bush, added a renewable energy component four years later, under President Obama.
The largest loan, partially issued between 2014 and 2019, was by VOGTLE for $ 12 billion for the construction of Vogtle units 3 and 4, which the DoE coined “the next generation of the nation ‘s advanced nuclear reactors “. The reactors are likely to be missing from the promised November 2021 service dates.
The second largest loan in the program, issued in 2009, was for Ford Motor Company worth $ 5.9 billion with the goal of renovating facilities to improve fuel efficiency.
The two loans account for more than half of the nearly $ 30 billion in outstanding loans issued by the DoE.
The loan program is part of President Biden’s aggressive push toward cleaner energy, with Granholm a second perfectly green chair.
The $ 40 billion funds have been available and have been expected to be disbursed for years, but with the new administration, expectations are that we will see more clean energy funds.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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