Energy Department Defends Funding of Foreign-Owned Renewables Projects

Matt Rogers, the senior adviser to the energy secretary, told a Senate committee last week that the agency’s distribution of recovery funding to foreign renewables companies was creating American jobs.

Amid mounting criticism, the Energy Department last week defended its allocation of stimulus funding to foreign companies developing renewable energy projects in the United States.

Matt Rogers, the senior adviser to the energy secretary, told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on Thursday that 100 percent of the $2.6 billion it gave out through the renewable energy grant program included in last year’s economic recovery plan went to fund American projects and that the $2.3 billion in tax credits it provided for 183 clean energy manufacturing projects in 43 states will generate more than 17,000 jobs.

A day earlier, four senators, led by Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat of New York, called on the Obama administration to halt spending on a renewable energy program in the economic stimulus package until there were rules to assure that the projects use predominantly American labor and materials.

But at the hearing Thursday, Mr. Rogers said it is probably true that nearly 80 percent of the companies that received grants were based abroad, as cited in a recent analysis by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit journalism program affiliated with American University. But the funding, together with the manufacturing tax credits, resulted in $10 billion of foreign investment in the United States over the last year, Mr. Rogers said.

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