President Obama passes the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

18 February 2009

Following months of planning, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been signed in.

The economic stimulus package covers comprehensive plans for infrastructure, energy, health and education needs.

President Obama placed great emphasis on his country’s dependency on foreign oil as a threat to national security and the environment and has vowed to see the introduction of nationwide clean energy projects. The programme will provide more than $30bn for energy initiatives such as a smart power grid, advanced battery technology and energy efficiency measures.

Tax incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency will be introduced over the next ten years which includes a three-year extension of the production tax credit for electricity derived from wind through 2012 and for electricity derived from biomass, geothermal, hydropower, landfill gas, waste-to-energy, and marine facilities through 2013.

President Obama said, ‘What I am signing is a balanced plan with a mix of tax cuts and investments. It is a plan that has been put together without earmarks or the usual pork barrel spending. And it is a plan that will be implemented with an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability we expect you, the American people, to hold us accountable for the results. That is why we have created Recovery.gov, so every American can go online and see how their money is being spent.’

The measure includes $16.8bn for the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). The funding is a nearly tenfold increase for EERE, which received $1.7bn in fiscal year 2008.

While the bulk of the new EERE funding is supporting direct grants and rebates, $2.5 billion will support EERE’s applied research, development, and deployment activities, including $800m for the Biomass Program, $400m for the Geothermal Technologies Program, and $50m for efforts to increase the energy efficiency of information and communications technologies.

An additional $400m will support efforts to add electric technologies to vehicles. And separate from the EERE budget, $400m will support the establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), an agency to support innovative energy research.

‘Our American story is not, and has never been, about things coming easy,’ the President added. ‘It is about rising to the moment when the moment is hard, converting crisis into opportunity, and seeing to it that we emerge from whatever trials we face stronger than we were before.’

Copyright © 2009 newnet

Tags: renewable energy

This story was published on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 10:37 am and is filed under North America, energy efficiency, policy. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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