A new flight of large-scale climate projects requiring financial backing of about $1 trillion a year will be needed to meet the Biden administration’s carbon goals, a U.S. Energy Department official said in a presentation on Thursday.<\/p>\n
“The pace at which we are deploying climate solutions is wholly unacceptable,” said Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office at a virtual panel organized by IHS Markit as part of its CERAWeek conversations series.<\/p>\n
The Biden administration has set a goal to reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035. The U.S. Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office is intended to provide funding to emerging green technologies that may not qualify for financing from commercial banks.<\/p>\n
“At some point we can hand it off to Wall Street to do the next $100 billion,” he said. “Every one of these technologies has to get to a $1 trillion scale – that’s the only way we get to the goals we’ve set.”<\/p>\n
In the United States, about $200 billion is spent annually on new climate change mitigation efforts, Shah said.<\/p>\n
“That number has to probably be a trillion dollars a year” to meet the administration’s goals to be announced this November at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Glasgow.<\/p>\n
Shah did not elaborate on the planned announcement, but the administration has previously set targets for a pollution-free economy by 2050.<\/p>\n
The Loan Programs Office has about $46 billion in loans and loan guarantees available to help fund large-scale energy and energy infrastructure projects in the United States.<\/p>\n
Shah’s office received applications for about $7 billion a month of financing for projects, and is aware of 40 potential incoming projects in areas as varied as advanced nuclear power to electric vehicle battery manufacturing.<\/p>\n
Such projects could include more expansive approaches to carbon capture and sequestration, which involves trapping carbon dioxide and preventing it from entering the atmosphere, that have gained traction at a smaller scale.<\/p>\n
“Now the question becomes, what does scale-up look like,” he said. “We have to find the next set of technologies.”<\/p>\n
The loan guarantee program has come under scrutiny for past failures including providing loans to solar cell maker Solyndra, which filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2011.<\/p>\n
But Shah also pointed to success stories, noting a loan to a Tesla Inc. manufacturing plant helped launch the electric car company’s Model S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A new flight of large-scale climate projects requiring financial backing of about $1 trillion a year will be needed to meet the Biden administration’s carbon goals, a U.S. Energy Department official said in a presentation on Thursday. “The pace at which we are deploying climate solutions is wholly unacceptable,” said Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office at a virtual panel organized by IHS Markit as part of its CERAWeek conversations series. The Biden administration has set a goal to reach 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035. The U.S. Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office is intended to provide funding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-426990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-power"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}