Politics

Energy Dept. asks for budget increases, despite rocky past year

Paul Conner Executive Editor
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Despite a tumultuous political and fiscal year, the Department of Energy is asking Congress for a substantially bigger budget in 2013 for some of its most disputed programs.

As part of President Obama’s budget proposal released Monday, the Energy Department requested that funding for its Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, which seeks to invest in clean energy initiatives, increase 29.1 percent from 2012 to over $2.3 billion. The program’s 2012 enacted budget was $1.8 billion.

The EERE program includes some of DOE’s most criticized initiatives, like home weatherization, research into solar, water, wind and geothermal energy technology, and incentives for manufacturers and buildings to become more energy efficient.

Overall, the DOE’s budget would increase 3.2 percent.

DOE famously lost over half a billion dollars in loan guarantees when the solar power company Solyndra went bankrupt.

“The choice we face as a nation is simple: do we want the clean energy technologies of tomorrow to be invented in America by American innovators, made by American workers and sold around the world, or do we want to concede those jobs to our competitors?” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement. “We can and must compete for those jobs.”

At least one program is seeking to solidify funding in 2013 for projects that were financed through the Recovery Act, dubbed the stimulus. The weatherization program is requesting double what it requested in 2012 for grants to states and homeowners in order to “sustain essential weatherization production … as the remaining Recovery Act projects are completed.”

The Energy Department’s “can’t stop now” attitude is exactly what many congressional Republicans feared when Obama first proposed the stimulus.

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