Obama’s 2015 Budget Proposes Billions in Clean Energy Funding

President Barack Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget proposal for the 2015 fiscal year contains billions in potential renewable energy investments.

The funding would vary from research to deployment efforts on federal lands and waters.

In all, the president is requesting about $27.9 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

“The U.S. remains the global leader in energy, science and security, building on its longstanding commitment to innovation,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a statement. “The president’s budget request for the Department of Energy sustains this commitment for future generations—in clean energy, in frontier scientific discovery and in global nuclear security.”

The proposal includes:

More than $900 million in “basic clean energy research” in the Office of Science

More than $500 million to increase the use and reduce the costs of renewable power

About $325 million for the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which includes energy to support transformative applied energy research

$314 million toward a unified grid modernization strategy to address institutional and technological challenges in securing the grid and making it more flexible.

The budget also calls for $345 million to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and $5 billion in USDA loans that would go to rural utilities and cooperatives to aid renewable energy deployment. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI) would receive about $95 million to review and permit new projects on federal lands and waters with an eye on the Climate Action Plan’s goal of 20 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity.

The budget proposal also contains an endorsement of the Production Tax Credit, which various groups have advocated for over the past few months.

“In order to provide a strong, consistent incentive to encourage investments in renewable energy like wind and solar, create American jobs, and support American companies and manufacturers, the Budget would make permanent the tax credit for the production of renewable electricity and reform it by making it refundable,” according to the budgetary fact sheet.

Unfortunately for renewable energy advocates, the budget request also includes more than a combined $1.3 billion for the research, development and storage of fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

Visit EcoWatch’s RENEWABLES page for more related news on this topic.

[source: http://ecowatch.com/2014/03/06/obamas-2015-budget-clean-energy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=obamas-2015-budget-clean-energy]