12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions · Notable
Limit new DOE loan authority to grid reliability and national security projects
Printed page 384 12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions
“Limit the use of new loan or loan guarantee authority to projects that will promote the reliability and resilience of the electric grid and other energy infrastructure and support national security objectives.”
What has happened
- Partially done
DOE implemented the restriction by interim final rule, amending its loan guarantee regulations to carry the new eligible-project definition and criteria.
- Partially done
P.L. 119-21 section 50403 rewrote Energy Policy Act section 1706 so that eligible projects are limited to retooling, repowering, repurposing or replacing energy infrastructure that has ceased operations, enabling operating infrastructure to increase capacity or output, and supporting known or forecastable electric supply needed to maintain or enhance grid reliability or system adequacy, with the program purpose recast around energy and critical minerals. That is the grid-reliability limb of the Quote, enacted. Partial: the national-security limb is not in the statute, and the section 1703 innovative technology loan guarantee authority is untouched.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
The lending that followed is consistent with the limit — transmission reconductoring for AEP, generation and grid investment for Southern Company, nuclear supply chain — but the limit itself is what this Quote asks for and is what is dated here.
#972 records the separate ask that no new loans be backed at all, which failed.
- Action
- restrict
- Object
- DOE loan and loan guarantee authority
- ID
- 975