White House races to lend billions in climate funds before election

livemint.com:

The $400 billion federal clean-energy lending program that has faced criticism for moving too slow is stepping up efforts to push cash out the door before the election. The Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office was turbocharged by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which gave it hundreds of billions of dollars to lend to clean-energy businesses. So far, it has only used a tiny fraction of that capacity.

Biden administration officials fear that if Donald Trump is elected, the office would stop making loans. The program was largely dormant while Trump was president. “The election is everything," said Adam Forgie, the Democratic mayor of Turtle Creek, Pa., where a startup making zinc batteries for energy storage has opened a factory at the site of an old Westinghouse plant that shut down in the 1980s.

The closure was part of a manufacturing-industry collapse that destroyed thousands of jobs in Pittsburgh and surrounding areas like Turtle Creek. The startup, Eos Energy, has a nearly $400 million commitment from the loan office that was announced a year ago to expand the factory and create several hundred jobs. “Hopefully whoever wins understands the need for business in this town," Forgie said.

Eos Chief Executive Joe Mastrangelo said the company is working as fast as possible to get the deal done soon. Under the Biden administration, the program has agreed to lend about $6.5 billion to five companies. It made $24.9 billion in commitments for loans to new companies such as Eos that haven’t gotten final approval.

It had more than 200 active applications for $281 billion in loans at the end of July. The pace of loan commitments has accelerated recently. The office announced a $1.45 billion pledge to a big solar-panel maker,