Recovery Act Energy Impact Report Released
Energy Hub for Energy-Efficient Building Design Created
HUD: $100M for Housing Efficiency Retrofits
DOE: $120M for Weatherization Projects
DOE: $15M Geothermal Heat Recovery Opportunity
DOE Extends Renewable Energy Loan Guarantee Solicitation
Biden Releases Report Showing Recovery Act Energy Impact
On August 24, Vice President Joe Biden releases an analysis showing that the Recovery Act's $100 billion investment in innovation is helping accelerate significant advances in science and technology.
According to "The Recovery Act: Transforming the American Economy through Innovation," the U.S. is now on track to achieve three major energy innovation breakthroughs thanks to Recovery Act investments:
- cutting the cost of solar power in half by 2015;
- reducing the cost of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) by 70% between 2009 and 2015;
- doubling U.S. renewable energy generation and renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012.
The Recovery Act is also impacting science technology, and innovation projects ranging from building a nationwide smart energy grid to growing the emerging EV industry.
The numbers are compelling. Solar, for example, is on track to compete with traditional power sources for both households and utility scale power. For household electricity, solar is expected to drop from $0.21 per kWh in 2009 to $0.10 per kWh in 2015. Utility-scale solar should drop from $0.13 per kWh today to $0.06 in 2015. And rooftop solar could fall to as low as $0.06 per kWh by 2030, a cost less than household rates.
Costs for EV batteries will shrink from the current $33,000 to $10,000 in 2015, while plug-in hybrid batteries will drop from $13,000 to $4,000 apiece. These cuts will make EVs and hybrids competitive with similar non-electric vehicles.
Additionally, the U.S. is poised to both double renewable energy generation and renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012, aided by more than $23 billion of Recovery Act investments.
U.S. renewable energy generation capacity from wind, solar, and geothermal is expected to increase 100% by 2012, going from the 28.8 GW installed as of 2008 to 57.6 GW by the end of 2011. That amount of renewable energy will be enough to power 16.7 million homes.
U.S. renewable energy manufacturing capacity will also double from an annual output of 6 GW of renewable equipment (such as wind turbines or solar panels) to 12 GW by the end of 2011. See the DOE press release, the new White House Innovation Web site, and the full report (PDF 1.3 MB).
DOE Creates New Energy Hub for Energy-Efficient Building Design
On August 24, DOE announced its launch of the Energy-Efficient Building Systems Design Energy Innovation Hub to develop technologies that make buildings more energy efficient.
The hub team, led by Pennsylvania State University, will receive up to $122 million over the next five years to develop models that are applicable to both retrofits and new construction.
Located at the Philadelphia Navy Yard Clean Energy campus, the hub will bring together leading researchers from academia, two national labs, and the private sector. The goal is to formulate building designs that will save energy, cut pollution, create jobs, and position the U.S. as a worldwide industry leader.
The team will use the more than 200 buildings on the Navy Yard campus and its independent electric microgrid as a "virtual municipality" to test and validate new technologies. It will pursue a research, development, and demonstration program targeting technologies for single buildings and district-wide systems.
