Congress votes for spending bill without Trump energy cuts; Trump signs bill [update]

On Friday morning, the US Senate passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill that could avert yet another government shutdown. Although the bill covers the breadth of US government activities, one interesting outcome of budget negotiations is that the spending bill reflects none of President Trump’s most drastic proposed cuts to Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) renewable energy and early-stage energy programs.

In fact, the omnibus spending bill, which would secure funding out to September 2018, even increased the budgets of some renewable energy programs.

Update: Trump signed the bill Friday afternoon after threatening to veto it. Politico reported on Thursday that the president was in favor of the bill, but on Friday he tweeted that he might veto it due to the fact that the bill did not include funding for a border wall.

But the spending bill as it stands is a clear message from Congress that spending on renewable energy is still a priority. The DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy was supposed to be slashed by 65 percent, according to the president’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 budget request. Instead, the omnibus spending package (PDF) increases that office’s budget by 14 percent to $2.32 billion.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, was also supposed to be eliminated from the DOE’s budget line in Trump’s budget proposal. Instead, Congress agreed to increase ARPA-E’s budget by 16 percent to $353 million from $305 million in FY 2016. ARPA-E has long had bipartisan support in Congress because early-stage funding is distributed to all kinds of energy-related projects, improving knowledge about fossil fuels and renewable energy alike. It doesn’t hurt that funding is spread to institutions and companies across the country geographically, too.

The new budget also contains an $18 million increase for the DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. Energy reliability has been a hot topic at the DOE over the past year. In 2017, Energy Secretary Rick Perry invoked his concern for energy reliability when he pushed for a rule that would compensate struggling coal and nuclear plants over and above how the market already compensated those resources. The DOE’s justification for this was that US grid systems might become unreliable if those resources came offline. But industry participants and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have suggested that the phase-out of so-called “baseload” resources like coal and nuclear aren’t primary concerns for the reliability of the grid yet. Instead, FERC called for a study on grid resilience to weather and hacking, among other factors.

Beyond electricity reliability, Secretary Perry has made it clear that this administration aims to boost the production and use of fossil fuel and nuclear energy. Trump’s proposed budget reflected that as well, and this is where Trump’s proposed budget and Congress’ budget start to align. The DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy saw a nearly $110 million boost from the previous year, and money to support nuclear energy increased by $200 million. Although large nuclear reactors have had a bad time in the open market, the DOE has put forward considerable amounts of grant money to push forward small modular nuclear reactor technology.

The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, itself a source of controversy, was slated for cuts in Trump’s proposed budget but was granted $5 million in Congress’ bill.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose budget Trump threatened to cut by 31 percent, retained the same budget in 2018 as it did in 2017 in Congress’ bill. In addition to the main EPA funding, Congress also tacked on $760 million that will go to water infrastructure management and continuing to clean up Superfund sites.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1280327