"Eight U.S. utilities received awards in what may be the last act for an Inflation Reduction Act program meant to offer low-cost financing for big energy projects."
"The Biden administration announced $22.4 billion in loans for eight U.S. utilities across 12 states on Thursday, in what may be the swan song for an Inflation Reduction Act program aimed at cutting carbon emissions and energy bills by helping build and retrofit power plants and bolster the grid.
The conditional loans, issued by the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) via the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment (EIR) program, are meant to help utilities reduce the cost of securing financing for projects stretching from the Pacific Northwest to the mid-Atlantic coast. Those projects include building or retrofitting hundreds of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines, repairing fossil gas pipelines, and deploying new renewable energy, battery storage, and customer-sited energy assets.
These loans offer lower interest rates than what utilities can typically secure for debt on commercial markets and could allow them “to stabilize energy costs and expand access to clean energy to nearly 15 million customers nationwide,” a DOE official said during a Wednesday briefing with reporters."
Jeff St. John reports for Canary Media January 16, 2025.
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