Market News
| March 06, 2010 Obama pledges billions to develop clean energy | |
| Consider the last week alone. On Tuesday in Savannah, Ga., Obama unveiled details of his HomeStar plan to give people rebates worth up to $3,000 for making their homes more efficient. He's asking Congress to fund the program, estimated to cost about $6 billion. The same day in Washington, the Department of Energy announced $100 million in Recovery Act funds to develop green technologies such as thermodevices and grid-scale energy storage. On Friday, more speeches and money. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced $117 million in loan guarantees to help build a 30-megawatt wind energy project in Kahuku, Hawaii, and $72 million to Minnesota-based SAGE Electrochromics to build a 250,000 square foot facility to make electronically tintable, energy-saving glass. These loan guarantees follow $8.3 billion offered last month to help build two new nuclear power reactors in Georgia and $1.4 billion to create the world's largest solar complex in California's Mohave Desert. Too much? His HomeStar proposal received mixed reaction, as a prior post reports, as did his January budget request to triple loan guarantees for nuclear power plants. Environmental and taxpayer groups such as the National Taxpayers Union criticized it but pro-nuclear industry groups such as the CASEnergy Coalition gave it a thumbs up. "The jobs of tomorrow will be jobs in the clean energy sector," Obama said Friday in Arlington, Va., where he visited OPOWER, a company that prods consumers to reduce their energy use in part by comparing their utility bills to that of their neighbors. He added:
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