The expansion of the Grand Ridge Energy Center in Illinois is one of many projects that has benefitted from the federal stimulus package. Photo: GE Cross-posted from the Breakthrough Institute blog.
A slew of critical news articles about a clean energy stimulus program have suggested both that the program is a government boondoggle and that the Obama administration has inflated the number of jobs supported by the program. Both contentions are misleading.
One article published by MSNBC, titled “Hot air? White House takes credit for Bush-era wind farm jobs,” begins this way:
The Obama administration is crediting its anti-recession stimulus plan with creating up to 50,000 jobs on dozens of wind farms, even though many of those wind farms were built before the stimulus money began to flow or even before President Barack Obama was inaugurated.
It is true that some of the projects that received funding under the stimulus-funded Section 1603 cash grant program went to projects that had completed construction prior to the stimulus bill. The MSNBC article, written by journalist Russ Choma, notes that 11 of the 70 major wind farms that rec... Read more
