This week, Mitt Romney echoed an accusation made by various conservative bloggers against President Obama - that his administration has spent $90 billion on green energy.
“Do you know how much money he invested in so-called green energy companies?†Mr. Romney asked during a campaign stop in Manchester, N.H., on Monday “Ninety billion. Ninety billion!â€
But is it true?
Roughly, yes. In fact, the number appears in a document on the White House Web site and represents the financing available in the 2009 stimulus package. Not all that money has been spent; the Energy Department, for example, received $35 billion under the act but has spent only $26 billion thus far, according to Jen Stutsman, a spokeswoman.
Yet not all of the money was for Obama administration projects.
Some funds for green energy were appropriated during the administration of President George W. Bush, but not spent until Mr. Obama took office. And some of the stimulus money - for green energy - went to programs signed into law by Mr. Bush, but were not actually financed until Mr. Obama became president.
Such spending overlap between administrations is common, particularly on energy initiatives. “Very few energy things actually get spun up quickly,'' said Michael E. Webber, the associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin.
Ms. Stutsman of the Energy Department said that the money for the programs was appropriated by Congress, and that the administration was spending it. “We're following Congressional direction very well,†she said.
Republicans have been arguing, though, that the money was not well spent. One example is the solar equipment manufacturer Solyndra, which also shows the overlap in spending between administrations.
Solyndra had a clever design for lightweigh t, easy-to-install solar arrays, and received a $535 million loan guarantee under a program that was approved for financing in the Bush administration. Energy Department officials turned down the loan application as incomplete shortly before Mr. Obama took office; the same officials later approved a revised application. The company went bankrupt, though, because the price of solar cells was plummeting.
Another example is the Advanced Research Projects Administration â€" Energy, or Arpa-e, modeled after the better-known Defense Research Projects Administration, or Darpa, which was credited with helping to create the Internet. The Arpa-e program was signed into law by Mr. Bush in 2007 but got no money until the stimulus was passed. It gives fairly modest grants to energy projects that are judged very risky but also highly promising.
The White House breaks down the $90 billion om green energy projects in the stimulus bill like this:
- $29 billion for energy efficiency, including $5 billion for improvements in the homes and apartments of low-income households
- $21 billion for renewable electricity generation, including wind turbines and solar panels
- $10 billion for grid modernization, including millions of “smart meters†that read themselves, eliminating the need for meter readers
- $6 billion to help establish factories to make batteries for electric cars and other components of advanced vehicles
- $18 billion for fast trains
- $3 billion for research and development into capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide
- $3 billion for job training and scientific advances in green energy
- about $2 billion to help build wind turbines, solar panels and similar “green†products
The success of these investments is not yet clear. The economics of wind and solar have been hurt by another development, the crash i n the price of natural gas, which is a competing fuel for the production of electricity. The electric car has not yet emerged as a mass-market product to put a dent in oil consumption. The “smart grid†would be especially useful in helping manage a system with large amounts of wind and solar power, which vary in production over the course of the day, but such generating technologies have yet to adequately penetrate the market.
The politics of spending money on green energy are somewhat scrambled.
“There are now so many jobs in the clean energy world, you have Republicans who come to bat for clean energy,'' Mr. Webber said. “A lot of these jobs are in rural, Republican districts,'' he added, citing wind farms and ethanol production, which are big in Iowa, a swing state. “You have rural Republicans teaming up with urban Democrats to push for more wind,'' he said.
