WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today the Biden Administration unveiled details for its fiscal year 2022 budget request for the U.S. Department of Energy, including details on a new venture that will focus on lowering the cost of long-duration energy storage, as well as funding for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and the newly proposed Advanced Research Projects Agency-Climate (ARPA-C).

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and a coalition of clean energy organizations recently sent a letter to congressional leaders to express support for this budget request.

Following is a statement from Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA on the budget request:

“In order to address the climate crisis and meet President Biden’s ambitious clean energy goals by 2035, the solar industry needs to grow four times faster than we are today. The key to this is making it easier and faster to deploy solar and storage at a massive scale, and new funding for EERE and other clean energy agencies can help make that happen.

“Energy storage is a key part of our clean energy future, and we’re pleased to see that the Biden Administration is calling for grid-scale, long-duration energy storage costs to drop by 90 percent by 2030. Storage costs are dropping, but not nearly fast enough to support the level of deployment we need to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“The energy storage program, which will be modeled after the successful SunShot program, is a helpful framework for inspiring innovation, supporting a competitive storage market and pushing the clean energy industry to work together to achieve something greater than what we could do individually. Together, we can help to improve the dispatchability of long-range storage, establish a domestic manufacturing base for storage, and create jobs, all while cutting costs and emphasizing equity in everything we do.

“While the details of the budget are still emerging, this is an encouraging start and we are urging congressional leaders to fully fund the Administration’s budget request for these agencies, so that America can continue its global leadership on clean energy.”

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