President Obama beefed up his climate change agenda Monday morning with several new clean energy programs aimed at helping states meet his landmark regulations for reducing emissions, including a $1 billion boost for solar energy projects.
The White House made the announcement ahead of the president’s Monday trip to Las Vegas, where he will address Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s annual National Clean Energy Summit. The summit has been a touchstone event for the Democratic party and its supporters, along with industry, to discuss energy policy priorities.
“These actions build on state leadership, all across America, to continue to expand opportunities to install energy-saving technologies in households today, particularly those that need it most, while driving the development of innovative, low-cost clean energy technologies for tomorrow,” according to a White House fact sheet.
The new funds would seek to improve energy efficiency for American households and boost reliance on solar energy. The White House believes the approach would help consumers save money on electric bills while growing clean energy jobs through the workers needed to make the clean energy upgrades to homes.
“Last year, the United States brought online as much solar energy every three weeks as it did in all of 2008, and the solar industry added jobs 10 times faster than the rest of the economy,” the White House said. The rapid increase in solar development has managed to bring down the cost of the technology, making it more available to average Americans than ever before, according to the administration.
“Since the beginning of 2010, the average cost of a solar electric system has dropped by 50 percent,” according to the fact sheet. “In fact, distributed solar prices fell 10-20 percent in 2014 alone and currently 44 states have pricing structures that encourage increased penetration of distributed energy resources.”
Reid’s summit will kick off with a debate on how to expand the use of rooftop solar. His home state of Nevada is making a big push to expand solar panel deployments and transition the state to renewable energy.
Monday’s announcement included a number of changes to drive more clean energy into the states:
• The White House will give the Department of Energy $1 billion in new loan guarantee authority to support innovative solar energy projects.
• The administration will launch a joint Department of Energy and Housing and Urban Development program that seeks to provide homeowners with ways to measure and improve the energy efficiency of their homes. This will be combined with a separate program to allow homeowners to get financing for clean energy improvements for single-family homes.
• The administration will provide $24 million for 11 projects in seven states “to develop innovative solar technologies that double the amount of energy each solar panel can produce from the sun.”
• An “Interagency Task Force to Promote a Clean Energy Future for All Americans” will be created, which which will include new commitments from local governments, utilities and businesses to help more than 300,000 low-income households make energy improvements, while investing more than $220 million in “energy saving activities for veterans and low-income customers to help decrease their energy bills.”
• A Department of Defense “Privatized Housing Solar Challenge” will be created, with companies committing to provide solar power to over 40 military bases. The administration says this will help save military families money on electric bills, making “military communities more energy secure.”
• Finally, the administration will also seek to approve a new transmission line to bring online a large 485-megawatt solar panel facility online in Riverside County, Nev. It will produce enough renewable energy to power more than 145,000 homes.
The White House says these actions will help states meet their emission targets under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. The plan places states on the hook to reduce emissions by 32 percent by 2030.
