By Audrey Streb
Excerpt:
Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Friday that his agency plans to cut billions in grant funds for Biden-era loans as the Trump administration conducts a review of the department’s $400 billion clean energy investments, a decision that energy policy experts who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation cheered on.
Before leaving office, former President Joe Biden squeezed $25 billion into the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office (LPO) for various projects, with the bulk of the funds going toward renewable energy development. Wright’s newly announced plans to review and cancel a majority of the loans has the backing of several energy policy experts who told the DCNF that the LPO has stripped cash from taxpayers and contributed to U.S. grid instability. (RELATED: ‘Unforced Error’: Energy Experts Say ‘Rush To Renewables’ Helped Trip The Switch On Spain’s Grid Crash)
“We’ve got a lot of reasons to be worried and suspicious about that,” Wright told Bloomberg in response to a question about the LPO. “Some of these loans will go forward, some of it, it’s too late to change course. A lot of them won’t go forward, but that’s a very careful review process that we’ve just put in place and just got a team to execute on.”
The LPO has previously dished out loans for nuclear energy, an industry championed by the Trump administration. However, among the loans finalized after the election were $6.57 billion to an electric vehicle manufacturing facility in Georgia and $289.7 million to solar energy development and battery storage in Massachusetts.
“[The LPO] may have been well-intended, but it’s morphed into a clean energy slush fund that dooms energy projects by making them tied to federal funding,” Gabriella Hoffman, the director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at Independent Women’s Forum wrote to the DCNF. “LPO investing currently undermines competition and market innovation of energy technologies. In the event it stays, however, it must be radically reformed to not prop up unreliable energy sources like solar and wind.”
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“The so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) increased DOE’s loan authority by $290 billion,” Myron Ebell, former senior fellow and director for the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute told the DCNF. “This gives the federal government the ability to finance a large number of commercially unviable companies and prop up the entire renewable energy industry. The special interests that line up for these handouts spend more effort on lobbying in D.C. than they do on innovating and producing competitive products. DOE’s corporate welfare handouts need to be ended,” he said. (RELATED: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: Biden’s Climate Bill Turns Two Years Old)
“First, the Trump administration should suspend any further loans, and second, Congress should end DOE’s loan authority in the reconciliation package,” Ebell continued. “The reconciliation package must also include repealing all the green energy tax subsidies in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Those two together will pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts.”
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“The entire program has to be shut down,” author and Climate Depot executive editor Marc Morano told the DCNF. “You can’t have the energy department picking winners and losers in the energy sector.”
