OVERNIGHT ENERGY: Defending green-energy loan guarantees

State of play: DOE official says green financing needed …

The top adviser to the head of the Energy Department’s loan programs office on Tuesday defended embattled federal efforts to advance green technologies.

Peter O’Rourke said loan guarantees, tax credits and other programs help pull Wall Street along. Wall Street, he said, is populated more by “lemmings” than the popular image of “cowboys.”

“The
financial sector is not known for its bravery and its trailblazing.
When you help establish markets, the financial sector tends to follow
them,” he said at the Washington Energy Summit in Washington, D.C.

He noted that long-term construction projects (think nuclear plants) and innovative projects benefit from financing certainty.

“A nuclear power plant takes 10 years to build with all of the process that’s involved in it. There is no such thing as 10-year private sector money. It just doesn’t exist. The renewable energy sector is a new sector for project finance,” said O’Rourke, who is senior adviser to Jonathan Silver, head of the Loan Programs Office.

O’Rourke steered clear of discussing Solyndra, the California solar firm that received a $535 million loan guarantee but went bankrupt, and declined to take reporters’ questions after taking part in a panel discussion.

But during the event, he pushed back on the now-familiar GOP refrain that the loan guarantee program amounts to “picking winners and losers.”

“It makes it more finance-able to build these projects. It is not necessarily picking winners or losers because the people who come to us have to spend a whole of money in the private sector just to get to us in order to get that long-term debt,” he said.

… and a major think tank does too

The Brookings Institution, a think tank, is warning that the Solyndra controversy is no reason to back away from the Energy Department’s loan program.

“The reality is the DOE’s loan guarantee program will likely result in minimal costs and large gains for taxpayers — just like many other federal lending efforts,” write Brookings’s Mark Muro and Jonathan Rothwell in a blog post.

Here’s a bit more from their piece:

The United States is failing to capture anything close to the full value of its many clean energy inventions many of which tend to be scaled up and manufactured abroad. So the choice is stark in the wake of Solyndra’s bankruptcy. State-directed capitalism a la China is neither effective in the long-run nor desirable at any point, but laissez-faire only guarantees market failure.

The item also takes the press to task for what the Brookings’s duo called shoddy coverage. Check it out here.

NEWS BITES

Green group calls on DOJ to investigate TransCanada lobbyist: A major environmental group is pressing the Justice Department to investigate the lobbying activities of a top TransCanada official.

Friends of the Earth, says Paul Elliott, a TransCanada official and former aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, lobbied the Obama administration for approval of the company’s Keystone XL pipeline for more than a year without registering as a lobbyist.

The environmental group says Elliott’s actions amount to a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires employees of foreign companies to disclose their lobbying activities.

“The American people need to know when foreign entities are trying to influence the actions of the U.S. government,” Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the Canadian oil corporation behind the Keystone XL pipeline was trying to do just that, and its top lobbyist failed to disclose what he was up to. The Justice Department has a responsibility to investigate this serious violation of law.”

The request for an investigation is the latest attempt by Friends of the Earth and other groups to discredit TransCanada, which is pushing for the approval of a controversial pipeline that would carry oil sands from Alberta to refineries in Texas.

Friends of the Earth released a series of emails last week the group, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, that show Elliott repeatedly pressing the State Department for approval of the pipeline.

Critics of the Keystone XL pipeline have raised a slew of safety concerns, while proponents say the project offers major economic benefits.

A TransCanada spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

DOE report bets big on clean vehicles: The Energy Department released on Tuesday its first Quadrennial Technology Review, a report outlining a path forward for developing various energy technologies.

Among other things, the report recommended that the department focus heavily on developing low-emissions vehicle technology.

In the transportation sector, the report says DOE “will devote its greatest effort to electrification of the vehicle fleet.”

You can read the full report here.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…

Here’s a quick roundup of Tuesday’s E2 stories:

— Sen. Paul places hold on pipeline safety bill
— Perry urges Obama to block major EPA rule
— GOP lawmaker demands independent probe into Solyndra
— Senate spending bill strips Solyndra language
— Waxman to Issa: Get Solyndra facts straight

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