SEC Says White House Budget Shortchanges Renewable Energy

0 Comments | Renewable Energy Today, Feb 11, 2005

The Sustainable Energy Coalition (SEC) issued a statement earlier this week on the White House FY 06 budget, observing that its request for the Department of Energy's (DOE) energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE) programs "has once again been reduced, this time by nearly $50 million - an overall cut of roughly four percent."

"The bottom-line total, however, masks far deeper cuts in a number of sustainable energy budgets," said SEC, noting that distributed energy has been cut six percent, geothermal energy has been cut eight percent, energy-efficient buildings has been cut 11 percent, biomass/biofuels has been cut 18 percent, industrial energy efficiency has been cut 24 percent and hydropower has been cut 90 percent.

"The overall reductions appear less drastic only because of significant increases for the hydrogen program (five percent) and the fuel cells program (12 percent)," said SEC.

According to SEC, while it supports both fuel cell and renewable hydrogen development and has advocated funding increases for them as well as an overall doubling of the federal sustainable energy budget over the next five years, the coalition "strongly opposes cutting key efficiency and renewable energy programs or skewing funding towards just a handful of technologies currently favored by the administration."

"With this request, the administration is continuing its policy of slowly bleeding the budgets for most of its core renewable energy and energy efficiency programs with cut after cut after cut - a policy that ignores the consumer, job creation, national security and rural economic development benefits of sustainable energy technologies," said SEC.

Contact: Ken Bossong, SEC, phone 202-293-2898 ext 201, website http://www.sustainableenergy.org.

(EIN STAFF: 2/7)