Over the weekend, President Obama announced two massive loan guarantees meant to promote solar power manufacturing in the United States. The guarantees will make it easier for the projects to raise financing.

One project, which involves a guarantee for a $400 million loan, is for the start-up Abound Solar Manufacturing, based in Loveland, CO, which has developed a new method for manufacturing cadmium telluride solar panels, the most successful type of "thin-film" solar panel on the market today. (Last year First Solar, a cadmium telluride solar manufacturer, produced more watts of solar panels than any other solar company.) The money is for two factories, one in Colorado and another in Indiana.

The second guarantee, for a $1.45 billion loan, is for the Spanish company Abengoa to build a large 250 megawatt solar power plant that will use parabolic mirrors to concentrate heat from the sun, which will then be used to make steam and drive turbines. The press release accompanying the announcement takes pains to note that the project will create manufacturing jobs in the United States, not just in Spain. It says that "over 70 percent of the components and products" will be made in the United States. Building the plant will employ 1,600 workers in Arizona, and drive the construction of a new mirror manufacturing plant near Phoenix, but the finished power plant will only provide 80 permanent jobs.

The government has been promising to guarantee loans for nuclear power plants for years--as a way of bringing down the cost of financing these fantastically expensive projects. Now the Department of Energy has actually issued its first one, an $8.33 billion guarantee to support the construction of two nuclear reactors to be built at the site of an existing nuclear power plant in Burke, GA.

It's been decades since new nuclear reactors have been built in the United States. In 2005 Congress passed a law allowing the DOE to issue loan guarantees for nuclear power plants to get construction going again. But it's taken until now for the department to issue one. (Read the TR article "Obama Goes Nuclear" to see why the guarantees are needed.) The $8.33 billion is part of the $18.5 billion provided for such loan guarantees in the 2005 bill. President Obama's proposed budget would increase the total by $36 billion, enough for about seven new plants.

The loan guarantee for the Burke reactors comes with a catch, however. The design for the nuclear reactors to be used there--the Westinghouse AP1000--hasn't yet passed muster with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Last October the commission informed Westinghouse that it had to fix problems with the "shield building" which is supposed to protect the reactor from "severe weather and other events."

The Department of Energy has announced the first projects that will be supported by the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy.

Among the new projects is one that will develop an all liquid battery for reliably storing large amounts of electricity from renewable sources of energy, which we featured here.