DOE Secretary Before Senate Appropriations Committee

Statement of DOE Secretary Stephen Chu
U.S. Department of Energy

Before the

Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations

Hearing Regarding the FY 2011 Budget Request
March 4, 2010

Excerpt

Energy

To transition to a low-carbon future, we must change the way we generate and use energy. The President’s budget request invests in clean energy priorities, including an investment of $2.4 billion in energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy. It also promotes innovative energy efficiency and renewable energy projects through $500 million in credit subsidy that will support $3 to $5 billion in lending. It expands the Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit by $5 billion to help build a robust domestic manufacturing capacity for clean energy technologies. Through this budget, we will increase research, demonstration, and deployment of wind, solar and geothermal energies; make buildings and homes more efficient; develop energy efficient vehicles; and pursue carbon capture and sequestration.

Nuclear energy must also be a part of our clean energy mix. During his State of the Union address, President Obama said, “To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” The President and I are committed to restarting our domestic nuclear industry. Our budget request includes an additional $36 billion in loan guarantee authority for the nuclear power sector to help construct the first new nuclear plants in decades, as well as $495 million for research and development to support the competitiveness, safety and proliferation resistance of nuclear energy in the United States and abroad. On February 16, President Obama announced conditional commitments for more than $8 billion in loan guarantees for what will be the first U.S. nuclear power plant to break ground in nearly three decades.

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