The ministry also introduced a new consultant touting the possibility of converting coal-fired power plants to nuclear power.
Jigar Shah, director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Loan Programs, speaks last month in Houston.
The Department of Energy is urging more corporations to apply for federal loans for blank power projects at shuttered coal-fired power plants and former commercial sites, after pronouncing the first such loan last week.
“These existing sites go a long way toward achieving the president’s vision of relocating and relocating many of those projects in our country,” Jigar Shah, director of the DOE’s Office of Loan Programs, said Monday. Shah spoke at a webinar hosted through the Interagency Working Group on Coal-fired and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 gave the DOE Loan Office the authority to lend to projects at former commercial sites. Last week, the bureau announced its first conditional commitment to the program: a $1. 5 billion loan to restart the shuttered Palisades nuclear power plant on the coast. of Lake Michigan.
The loans are part of the Biden administration’s broader strategy, bolstered by the Inflation Reduction Act and the two-component infrastructure law of 2021, to uplift hurting communities where investment has fled in recent decades.