Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman has unveiled a bipartisan proposal to make financing available to bring green energy technologies to market.  Bingaman chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. 

Bingaman’s 21^st Century Energy Technology Deployment Act (CEDA), cosponsored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), creates an independent agency within the Department of Energy that will provide credit – loans and loan guarantees, among other things – to the private sector to invest in the deployment of innovative green technologies. 

“New clean energy technologies will be needed to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels and lower the amount of greenhouse gases that our nation emits every day.   This legislation is a bipartisan effort to position the U.S. to lead the development and deployment of clean energy technologies by ensuring that commercial financing for these technologies is readily available for the future,” Bingaman said.

CEDA’s mission would be to encourage deployment of technologies that are perceived as too risky by commercial lenders; thus, the agency is encouraged to back riskier technologies with a higher potential to address our climate and energy security needs. The agency is to use a portfolio investment approach in order to mitigate risk and is to try and become self-sustaining over the long term by balancing riskier investments with revenues from other services and less risky investments.

CEDA would be an autonomous entity with strong guidance and aggressive goals for technology deployment set by an independent advisory council, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy. The bill sets out a process for goal-setting in the various areas and then mandates numerical targets for achieving the goals, against which the performance of CEDA may be judged.  There would be various levels of financial oversight, including audits by the comptroller general and unfettered access to the books of CEDA by the Energy Secretary.