A review of President Obama’s $27.2 billion fiscal year 2013 budget request for the Energy Department reveals an emphasis on critical investments in clean energy technologies.
The budget lays out broad support for funding research that leads to the development, deployment, and production of clean energy technologies, in addition to remedying past environmental issues left over from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.
The President’s FY 2013 budget request includes specific goals such as:
- Reduce the cost of solar energy by 75%, including making it cost competitive without subsidies by the end of the decade;
- Continue efforts to reduce our dependence on oil by 30% by 2025;
- Appropriate $60 million to perform critical research on energy storage systems and devise new approaches for battery storage;
- Eliminate 4.6 million gross square feet of excess DOE property;
- Spend $276 million for the development of advanced fossil fuel power systems and carbon capture, utilization, and storage technologies; and
- Invest $770 million in nuclear energy, including $65 million for cost-shared awards to support first-of-their-kind small modular reactors.
“The United States is competing in a global race for the clean energy jobs of the future,” says DOE Secretary Steven Chu. “The choice we face as a nation is simple: do we want the clean energy technologies of tomorrow to be invented in America by American innovators, made by American workers, and sold around the world, or do we want to concede those jobs to our competitors? This budget request includes responsible investments in an American economy that is built to last.”