A $400 Billion Clean Energy Program Is Racing to Get Money Out the Door.
Some fear Donald Trump could freeze the Energy Department’s loan office, which supports electric vehicles, geothermal, nuclear and other novel technologies.
At the heart of the Biden administration’s efforts to advance clean energy is a $400 billion lending program that has backed dozens of projects across the nation, including battery factories in Ohio and Tennessee, the revival of a shuttered nuclear reactor in Michigan and a novel rooftop solar expansion in Puerto Rico.
Now, the Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy is hustling to get money out the door before Donald J. Trump returns to the White House.
Mr. Trump hasn’t outlined his plans for the Energy Department. But some Republicans in Congress and advisers like Vivek Ramaswamy are already scrutinizing the loan office as they hunt for ways to slash federal spending. The conservative policy blueprint known as Project 2025 recommended that the loan office be “eliminated or reformed.”
Facing the prospect of drastic changes, the Biden administration has been working to finalize as many loans as possible before the changeover in January.
Under President Biden, the office has announced roughly $54 billion in loans or loan guarantees, which is still just a small portion of its lending authority. Of that, $19 billion was announced in the weeks after the election, including a conditional loan to help Rivian build an electric car factory in Georgia and a loan guarantee for an enormous power line in the Midwest.
Yet the office has closed only $13.5 billion of the deals to date — the rest are conditional commitments that could be delayed or halted by a new administration.
“They see the writing on the wall,” said Kennedy Nickerson, a former policy adviser to the loan programs office and now a vice president for energy at Capstone, a research firm. “They want to get out as much money as possible just to safeguard as much progress as they can.”
Some companies worry about being left in limbo.
“We’d prefer to get this done sooner rather than later,” said Andy Marsh, chief executive of Plug Power, a company that aims to convert renewable electricity into hydrogen fuels. In May, Plug received a conditional commitment for a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to build up to six facilities, but it has yet to finalize the deal. “It’s easier to keep the momentum going if we don’t have to start all over with a new team.”
EVgo, an electric car charging company that was awarded a $1 billion loan guarantee in October, said in a statement that it was “working diligently” to close its deal.
The election results loomed over an annual gathering convened by the loan program in Washington this week, where 1,800 people across the clean energy industry discussed everything from electric car charging networks to sustainable aviation fuels.
Many executives said they hoped that the Trump administration would keep the loan program running. Even if the office de-emphasized climate change, it would still have hundreds of billions of dollars in loan authority left to support technologies like nuclear power or critical mineral mining that could boost U.S. energy security and reduce reliance on China, they said.
“If we have any sort of significant slowdown over the next four years, China is going to have our lunch, dinner and breakfast,” said James Calaway, the chairman of Ioneer, a firm trying to open a lithium mine in Nevada with the help of a not-yet-final $700 million federal loan. (China currently dominates global production of lithium, a key ingredient in batteries.)
The Loan Programs Office was created in 2005 to help emerging energy technologies, which often have trouble getting conventional financing, become commercially viable. It gained notoriety after it lent $535 million in 2009 to Solyndra, a solar firm that went bankrupt two years later. But it also gave a crucial $465 million loan in 2010 to Tesla, which later grew into an electric vehicle powerhouse.
Mostly dormant during the first Trump administration, the office was revived under President Biden. It initially had $40 billion in loan authority, but that ballooned to more than $400 billion in 2022 when Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act.
Jigar Shah, an outspoken former solar entrepreneur who has called clean energy the “largest wealth-creation opportunity of our lifetime,” has led the office over the past four years and used its financial muscle to reshape the American energy landscape.
The program has access to thousands of experts at the Energy Department who can scrutinize novel technologies that commercial banks find too bewildering.
In recent years, it has focused on building up a domestic supply chain for electric vehicles to counteract China’s stranglehold on battery production. More than half of the office’s deals since 2021 — almost $34 billion — have gone toward electric vehicle and battery factories or companies that produce key components like graphite.
Mr. Shah says the country is on track to have enough battery manufacturing to supply growing domestic sales, up from almost nothing four years ago. “It was so impressive, from a standing stop, how fast this happened,” he said in an interview Thursday.
The office has also backed novel technologies that could ultimately prove valuable, such as a plant in South Dakota that could turn cornstarch into jet fuel, or a company that uses lasers to spot methane leaks from oil and gas wells.
This week, the office finalized a $303 million loan guarantee to Eos Energy, a Pennsylvania-based firm that makes a zinc-based battery for electric grids that can store power longer than conventional lithium-ion batteries.
“It’s great to have that done,” said Joe Mastrangelo, the chief executive of Eos. He said the process of being vetted by the office was “arduous,” but that doing so helped validate the technology to investors.
Mr. Shah had even bigger plans for the future. The loan office is still reviewing 212 applications worth $324 billion and has released detailed road maps — written in conjunction with industry — for scaling up technologies like advanced nuclear power, geothermal and smarter electric grids.
But much of that work will be left for the next administration.
Some experts wonder if a Trump administration might retain the program but reorient it to serve a different agenda. That could mean less money for electric vehicles, which Mr. Trump has bashed, and more money for technologies like carbon capture or geothermal, which some of Mr. Trump’s energy advisers have supported.
“It’s very obvious that doing big things is a bipartisan effort,” Mr. Shah said. “I’m super excited about how much interest there is from the incoming administration to keep a lot of this going, whether it’s doing nuclear, enhanced geothermal, carbon capture, aviation fuels.”
Asked about the Trump administration’s plans, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the transition team, said in an email that “the Department of Energy led by Chris Wright will roll back the Biden administration’s burdensome regulations on our energy industry and ensure every taxpayer dollar at the agency is being used to deliver on President Trump’s promise to restore America’s energy dominance.”
Some companies that haven’t finalized their loans say their projects should hold bipartisan appeal.
In Indiana, Wabash Valley Resources is planning to produce low-carbon fertilizer by burying the emissions from its factory 7,000 feet underground. The company has received a conditional commitment for a $1.5 billion loan guarantee, but it might not be finalized before January.
“I can see why some people worry, but we don’t worry,” said Nalin Gupta, the company’s chief executive. “We think this project will sell itself,” he said, adding that it would help reduce ammonia imports from China and help revitalize a former coal community that was carried by Mr. Trump in November.
Some lawmakers have criticized the loan office for picking up its pace. On Wednesday, three House Republicans sent a letter to Mr. Shah demanding that it “cease its campaign to quickly distribute federal funding before the incoming administration takes office.”
“The last-minute drive to expedite loans exposes the federal government — and American taxpayers — to tremendous risk,” said the letter, which originated with Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, who leads the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Mr. Shah said his office was not loosening its controls in the waning days. “Our process remains the same,” he said. “We continue to do everything with a fine-toothed comb. But right now, borrowers are sufficiently motivated to move more quickly.”
The loan office is profitable, with losses of just 3 percent, in line with commercial banks. Mr. Shah has said the office learned its lessons from Solyndra and installed more safeguards.
Mr. Shah expects that much of the loan office’s work will prove durable. Many of the 212 applicants still seeking hundreds of billions of dollars in loans are in Republican-controlled states and are pursuing solutions to problems that both parties are concerned about like the rapid growth in electricity demand.
“What these companies are doing is so important that I just think it’ll be unstoppable,” Mr. Shah said.
Quelle @ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/climate/...ar-batteries-trump.html |
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