How the Bill's two versions address Clean Energy:

[amborin]

"...Both bills would make significant investments in clean energy and other priorities, but the House bill would create between 343,000 and 444,000 more jobs. The Senate bill would spend more money, but the House bill spends its funds more effectively to maximize clean energy job growth. The House bill has $72 billion in clean energy spending and another $20 billion in clean energy tax incentives. The Senate bill also contains $68 billion in spending and $31 billion in tax incentives.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the clean energy plans is the Senate’s provision to transfer $500 million in loan guarantees for renewable energy projects to the Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program established under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That program disproportionately supports nuclear power plants and “coal to liquid fuel” projects. The Senate provision, sponsored by recovery package opponent Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT), would ultimately allow the government to provide a guarantee for $50 billion in loans to eligible projects, the vast majority of which will go to nuclear and “coal to liquid” projects.

Investments in these facilities would create relatively few jobs over the coming years. It would take at least three years for nuclear reactors to receive their licenses before any construction can begin. And there is already a backlog of $122 billion in loan guarantee requests for 21 reactors from the existing program. Congress authorized $38.5 billion in loan guarantees in 2007, yet the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Energy has not even been able to manage that amount. The Congressional Budget Office determined that the default rate for nuclear loans is 50 percent, so the taxpayer could easily risk to lose $25 billion if not the entire amount.

Coal-to-liquid projects are eligible for the loan guarantee program if they “avoid, reduce, or sequester air pollutants or anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.” Since there are no plants that employ such carbon reduction or capture technologies, it could be years before any CTL plant is built, delaying any jobs that may be created by these loan guarantees....."

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<http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/02/energy_decision_time.html>