30 Years After Its Founding, NREL Has No Cafeteria, Old Labs, Shrinking Budget Relative To 2001

[hatrack]

GOLDEN, Colorado: Thirty years after it was founded by President Jimmy Carter, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at the edge of the Rockies here still does not have a cafeteria. Evaporation chambers for new solar energy systems look like they belong in an H.G. Wells movie. Technicians had to knock out a giant door from a testing facility to fit modern wind turbine blades, which now stick out like a bare toe from an old sock.

The hopes for this neglected lab brightened a bit just over a year ago when President George W. Bush made the first presidential call on the lab since Carter. He spelled out a vision for the not-too-distant future in which solar and wind power would help run every American home and cars would operate on biofuels made from plant residues.

But one year after the presidential visit, the money flowing into the primary national laboratory for developing renewable fuels is actually less than it was when the Bush Administration took office. The lab's fitful history reflects a basic truth: Americans may have a growing love affair with renewables, with cutting oil imports and conserving energy, but it's a fickle one. Riding that wave, the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, recently promised committee hearings on how lawmakers could limit climate change and enhance energy independence, and Congressional Democrats pledged to find research dollars for clean energy.

EDIT

Prominent Democrats are talking about doubling the budget of the renewable lab, and otherwise greatly increase the priority of producing clean energy. "You got to invest in this new energy future that everybody pays lip service to, but when push comes to shove do we really stand there?," said Representative Mark Udall of Colorado, a senior Democratic spokesman on energy issues. "This is the country's economic future not to mention the national security ramifications." Institutional investments in private clean energy companies in North America and Europe are rising quickly, from $500 million in 2004 to $1.3 billion in 2005 and $2.7 billion in 2006, according to Venture Business Research, an independent group based in Britain. But even while top energy companies are also beginning to invest significant amounts of money in wind, solar and biomass, those investments pale in comparison with the resources they are pouring into making synthetic fuels out of oil sands, which emit significantly more carbon than conventional oil.

EDIT

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/22/business/lab.php

[LiberalEsto]

1. If they called themselves Homeland Security

Renewable Energy Labs they would probably be drowning in funding.

NREL does some incredibly good work in spite of their handicaps.

[kestrel91316]

2. Looks like everything is proceeding according to plan.

This facility is clearly not capable of turning a profit for a corporation.

I shouldn't need this:

:sarcasm:

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Remember, this "visit" was the one that revealed many of the staff ...

had just been laid off a couple of weeks earlier. They were hurriedly re-hired (temporarily!) in the hopes no one would notice and spoil Bu**sh**'s fly-through photo-op.

[NNadir]

4. Well it's probably the case that renewable energy has been taken over

by big corporations looking to make big profits.

[jpak]

5. Thank you Reagan, Cheney, Poppy and Junior

thanks for nothin'...

[JohnWxy]

6. and MSM, being the public relations arm of the Republican party, dutifully report all of

the Puppets empty pronouncements on renewable fuels plans but never report how funding is stagnant or has been cut to the very people we need most to accomplish these so called initiatives.

THe MSM sycophants, selling themselves to the power-structure just like prostitutes on the street.

I guess they have thick knee pads on. Brian Williams, please wipe your mouth before you give us the Republican approved version of reality. You'll make me sick otherwise.