Congress is getting ready this week to terminate the National Bioenergy Research Center and gut the Wind Research Program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). NREL researchers who are CRES members sounded the alarm over the weekend after finding out on Friday that many of them may be out of work next month.
On Tuesday the House of Representatives passed the House and Senate Conference Committee markup of the Energy Water and Development Appropriation Bill for 2006.
The bill keeps federal funding for renewable energy research level with last year’s spending.
Unfortunately, it more than doubled the earmarks that take money out of the Wind Energy and Bioenergy Research Programs and direct it elsewhere. Earmarks are when individual representatives direct funding to particular projects in their districts. With passage of the Energy Bill earlier this year, these earmarks have been in the forefront of the news. In fact, the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) said the Energy Bill was so full of pork barrel spending that ASES did not endorse it.
Congressional leaders usually wait until the conference committee is meeting behind closed doors to introduce earmarks. They emerge as part of a much larger bill that is hundreds of pages long. It appears that in this case, the House of Representatives voted on this bill without many of its members having had time to read it.
It took NREL staff a couple of days of read through the pile of paper and figure out what it will mean for the research programs. Some of the earmarks were listed together to support state initiatives, and others were buried in different portions of the massive spending bill. This year these added to $62 million in total, more than two thirds of the entire “research and development” budget for bioenergy. Then the staff had to calculate DOE’s contractual obligations to its industry partnerships and the 10% cut that the agency takes from all programs to pay the salaries of its staff.
Staff of the National Bioenergy Center, which number more than 90 people, were told Friday afternoon that all that the funding that would be left was sufficient only to cover their severance checks. The National Wind Technology Center is facing similar, severe cutbacks. It seems incredible, but Congress is getting ready to gut the two research programs in renewable energy technologies that have enjoyed the most success and commercial development just at a time when fossil fuel prices are their highest level in history. In the case of creating transportation fuels from biomass, these technologies represent our greatest near-term hope of reducing imports or fossil fuels.
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