U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu plans to issue the first loan guarantees for low-carbon energy projects in the next week or two. They will go to solar and energy efficiency technologies, adding that nuclear power projects would not be in the first tranche.
Applicants have been waiting years for about $40 billion in loan guarantees, which the DOE was mandated to disburse for advanced technology projects. They’ve been held up by
bureaucratic obstacles from the Bush administration.
"We think we can produce what would have taken four years to maybe four or five months," said Chu. "We can streamline the process, get rid of the unnecessary paperwork."
The DOE has about $33 billion in grant funding and $130 billion in loan and guarantee authority from the Recovery Act for clean energy, energy efficiency, nuclear, biofuel and other low-carbon projects. Chu said that new applications under the recovery bill would be approved by the summer.
His goal is to disburse 70% of the investments in the American Recovery Investment Plan by the end of next year.
Chu’s loan guarantee program reforms will cut paperwork from several hundred pages of applications to just a few dozen.
As of last November, DOE received 11 completed applications for a total of $8.2 billion in debt financing requests. In addition to clean energy applications, there are 21 for nuclear totalling more than $100 billion, vastly more than the $18 billion the DOE can disburse.
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