SOTU: What kind of money we talking about?

Not much

Posted by David Roberts at 11:56 PM on 31 Jan 2006

(Warning, numbers ahead. And I'm notoriously awful with numbers.)

This president has been known to ... mislead those who do not parse his words like Talmudic scholars. Here's what he said this evening:

So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy ....

So what, pray tell, is the current budget for clean-energy research at the DOE?

I'm going to assume Bush was talking about the DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy dept. Here are its budgets over the past few years:

FY2003: $1,202,326,000
FY2004: $1,235,478,000 (up 2.7%)
FY2005: $1,248,582,000 (up 1.1%)

The FY2006 budget (PDF; view as HTML) says this:

The Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Request for EERE is $1.2 billion, a $48.2 million decrease compared to Fiscal Year 2005 funding.

Let's assume they got what they wanted for for FY2006

FY2006: $1,200,414,000 (down 3.9%)

The promised 22% increase gives us this:

FY2007: $1,464,500,000 (up 22%)

$264 million of new money for EERE. It's not chump change.

Then again, for the cost of the Iraq war we could have had about 900 times more (and counting). So there's that.

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SOTU: What kind of money we talking about?

Less than David Roberts thinks, unfortunately. The 22% increase in "clean energy research" cannot be assumed to be within the efficiency and renewables budget, because $281 million of it is for "clean coal" (without carbon capture) and another $54 million is for "FutureGen," an advanced coal demonstration plant with carbon capture. So that's $335 million for "nonrenewable" energy right there. Solar and wind together get $192 million -- considerably less than the $257 million dollar cost of a single F-22 fighter plane. "Homegrown renewable biofuels" get $150 million, and hydrogen fuel cells -- the least effective technology for oil savings in the short run -- gets the most money --$289 million. Fuel cells are a "renewable" energy technology only to the extent that the energy consumed in separating, purifying, compressing and transporting hydrogen comes from renewable sources, which it currently doesn't. So that's a toal of $624 million for non-renewable energy and $342 million for renewables. Efficiency improvements in cars, appliances, and buildings -- a huge potential source of energy savings -- are not even mentioned.

by chrispaine at 2:33 PM on 01 Feb 2006

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