The New Apollo Program Fact Sheet

The New Apollo Program will generate billions of dollars in savings each year through greater efficiency in buildings, industrial facilities, power plants, and the power grid.  It will generate and invest $500 billion over the next ten years and create more than five million high quality green-collar jobs.

What we propose to invest - $50 billion per year - is a smaller share of the gross domestic product than what we spent on the original Apollo program. It is one-third the amount that we spend each year in Iraq.

I. REBUILD AMERICA CLEAN AND GREEN

Increasing Building Efficiency — Residential and commercial buildings are responsible for 40% of all US energy consumption.  The transportation, residential, and commercial sectors together make up nearly 70% of our energy use.

The largest “end-uses” of primary energy in residential buildings in 2005 were space heating (32%), air conditioning or space cooling (13%), water heating (13%) and lighting (12%).  The largest “end-uses” of primary energy in commercial buildings in 2005 were lighting (27%), space heating (15%), space cooling (14%) and water heating (7%). These four end uses account for 63% of primary energy consumption.

The second leading cause of foreclosures for low-income homeowners is unanticipated utility bills.

By 2035, fully three-quarters of U.S. buildings will be either new or substantially renovated.

The energy consumption of existing residential buildings can be reduced 15% to 35% when they undergo full energy-upgrade renovations such as more efficient insulation, windows and light; elimination of infiltration and duct leakage; upgraded furnaces, boiler and air conditioners; new power supplies that waste less electricity in stand-by or low-power modes; and energy-efficient appliances.

New homes constructed to meet the 30% increased efficiency goal will save the average homeowner $512 a year.  With a million homes constructed each year, that equals a savings for homeowners of $10.2 billion in energy costs over the next twenty years.

For every dollar invested in energy efficiency potential over the study time horizon, total energy bill savings averaged about $1.95. This return is a strong indication that energy efficiency is a low cost investment that yields substantial returns.

An initial upfront investment of up to $100,000 to incorporate green building features into a $5M project would result in a savings of at least $1M in today’s dollars over the life of the building  Even in a down economy, 40 percent of builders say they have an easier time marketing homes that were built to green specifications, even if such houses cost more than properties built using conventional techniques.

Ten billion dollars of investment into efficiency upgrades and retrofits would create more than 100,000 on-site jobs and hundreds of thousands more indirect jobs in the local economy.

Increasing Use of Renewable Power — America’s renewable energy industry has suffered badly from stop-and-go public incentives. This inconsistency has contributed to foreign competitors eclipsing American companies in the manufacture, sale, and installation of clean energy technologies, many of which were first developed in American laboratories.

Mandatory RPS policies have been created in 29 states and Washington D.C.; four additional states have non-binding goals.  A few pennies-per-kilowatt-hour of public support is all that is required to make renewable power competitive with fossil fuel. In fact, the cost of generating electricity from wind is already competitive with generating power from new coal-fired power plants. And renewable energy creates more jobs than coal: the same investment creates 50% more jobs in wind and in solar than in coal.

Energy efficiency is far more labor intensive than generation, creating 21.5 jobs for every $1 million invested, compared to 11.5 jobs for new natural gas generation. These jobs include installation, ongoing operations and maintenance of building systems, and new manufacturing to meet the increased demand for energy efficient appliances and building systems.

Modernizing our Electric Grid – We currently lose six percent to nine percent of all the power that enters the grid, costing the U.S. economy nearly $20 billion annually. Congestion and blackouts cost consumers another $79 billion a year.

The Department of Energy estimates the cost of an hour of power loss for industrial customers as $72,000 for a telephone ticket sales system, $2.58 million for a credit card processor or as much as $6.48 million for a commercial brokerage.

Grid upgrades will ease congestion and increase capacity, sending 50 to 300 percent more electricity through existing corridors.

Increasing Power Plant Efficiency — Combined heat and power (CHP) uses waste heat from power plants and industrial facilities to produce electricity and thermal energy that normally is cheaper than the energy otherwise purchased. A variety of industrial waste streams can be recycled into useful heat and power, as can many industrial processes, such as catalytic crackers at petroleum refineries and blast furnaces at steel mills. Conventional power plants also can be converted so their waste heat is captured and used for heating homes and businesses close to the plant.

All together, existing untapped CHP resources could generate up to 492,000 gigawatts of carbon-free power - as well as thousands of new green-collar jobs building, installing, and maintaining CHP systems.   
A 30% national gain in energy efficiency, resulting from investments in building efficiency, CHP systems, and renewable energy, will result in the creation of 1.2 million jobs by 2030.

Improving Transit and Transportation Infrastructure — Nearly 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector.

Transportation is the second largest cost (19 percent) of the American household budget, but this number drops to 9 percent or lower in areas near transit hubs.

In 2000, American families spent, on average, $1400 on gasoline.  By 2007, that number had risen to over $3000 per year, and it is on track to go above $4000 in 2008.

A lack of transportation choices also seriously harms American economic productivity: from 1982 to 2005, the annual cost of the extra time and fuel wasted in congestion rose from $15 billion to $78 billion per year in 2005 dollars. Each individual who commuted during peak periods in 2005 lost 38 hours on average-almost one work week- sitting in traffic.

Since 1980, the number of miles Americans drive has grown three times faster than the U.S. population, and almost twice as fast as vehicle registrations. If this continues, vehicle miles traveled will increase by nearly 60 percent from 2005 to 2030. These increases will wipe out any emissions reductions from the improved fuel economy standards enacted into law in 2007.

Transit programs don’t just reduce carbon emissions, they also create jobs. Public transit projects create nearly 19 percent more jobs per dollar than new road or bridge capacity projects. Investments in road and bridge repair and maintenance projects create nine percent more jobs per dollar than building new roads or bridges.

The National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission found that America needs to invest at least $225 billion annually for the next fifty years to upgrade our existing system to a state of good repair and create a more advanced surface transportation system to sustain and ensure economic competitiveness. We are spending less than 40 percent of this amount today.

Every $1 billion spent on federally-aided highway resurfacing projects creates some 10,421 person-years of construction jobs (as compared to 9,316 person-years of work for a similar investment in new highway construction).

II. MAKE IT IN AMERICA

Producing Advanced Biofuels –  Today, 96 percent of the energy for American cars and trucks comes from oil.

Thirty percent of all miles traveled are in vehicles that go fewer than 40 miles per day. If plug-in electric vehicles had batteries that could run 40 miles without being recharged, as many as 30% of vehicle-miles per day would not require any gasoline.

A shift to home-grown, advanced biofuels could slash the country’s oil trade deficit ($29.3 billion in April 2008, and rising), create competition and lower prices at the fuel pump, and reduce carbon emissions from our cars and trucks.

Cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel derived from non-food perennial crops like switchgrass, and advanced biodiesel, a renewable fuel for diesel engines produced from sustainable sources of fats and oils such as algae and waste materials, have the potential to replace 9 billion gallons of transportation fuels by 2025 and upwards of 100 billion gallons - nearly one-third the total projected U.S. gasoline demand - by 2050.

Conservative projections of future growth by the U.S. Department of Energy estimate that every 10 billion gallons of ethanol produced in the United States will generate 100,000 to 200,000 jobs.

Investing in Domestic Manufacturing — The U.S. has lost more than 3.8 million manufacturing jobs since 1998, due to mergers, bankruptcies, outsourcing, automation and globalization.

These are some of the country’s best middle-class jobs, paying an average of $25,000 more per year than service sector jobs and often providing good benefits as well.

The domestic market for solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells, and biomass engines alone is projected to reach $226 billion annually by 2016.

An aggressive program to promote domestic manufacturing of renewable energy products alone could help create or retain 85,000 permanent green-collar jobs on the factory floor-not to mention hundreds of thousands more indirect jobs in the local economy-and benefit up to 70,000 U.S. firms capable of making the required components, mostly located in the 20 states hardest hit by manufacturing job losses.

III. RESTORE AMERICA’S TECHNOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP

Investing in R&D — Public investment in energy-related R&D fell from $7.8 billion per year (in today’s dollars) in 1979 to less than $4 billion today. Public dollars beget private dollars:  for instance, in the medical and biotechnology field, a doubling of federal investment during the 1990s was accompanied by an 11-fold increase in private-sector investment. The decline in public investment in clean energy brought a corresponding decline in private capital.  From 1993 to 2005, private sector energy R&D investments fell 50 percent. In fact, from 1988 to 2003, the U.S. energy industry invested just one quarter of one percent of revenues in R&D, compared with pharmaceuticals, software, and computer companies, which invest up to fifteen percent of revenues in R&D.  New energy-related patents-an indicator of the rate of innovation-have declined parallel with the decline in R&D investing for such critical technologies as wind and solar photovoltaics.

Federal funding of research in the physical sciences, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), was 45 percent less in fiscal year (FY) 2004 than in FY 1976.

A critical role for public sector investment has always been to energize and facilitate private sector activity.

A study of the pharmaceutical industry quoted by the Congressional Budget Office showed that a one percent increase in federal funding for research produced a 2.5 percent increase in private research and development funding.

IV. TAP THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Investing in Green Jobs Training and Pathways Out of Poverty — Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s skilled workers are slated to retire in the next five to ten years.

America has fallen from second place to twentieth in the world in training engineers and natural scientists.

Jobs in heavy-polluting industries are on the decline, with or without the impacts of environmental regulations. Annual layoffs from plants shut down due to environmental regulation have averaged 1,000-3,000 in the United States since the1970s. Relative to economy-wide layoffs of typically more than 2 million workers each year, this is less than one tenth of 1 percent.

The poorest fifth of the population would, on average, face an estimated $750  a year in added costs (in today’s dollars) if emissions were reduced 15 percent below projected levels.

V. REINVEST IN AMERICA

Create a Cap and Invest System — In contrast to studies that rely exclusively on carbon charges to achieve reductions in emissions, we find that comparable reductions can be achieved when a much more modest carbon charge ($50 per ton as opposed to $100-$300 per ton) is applied in conjunction with policies designed to promote the adoption of energy-efficient technologies.

Moreover, a cap and invest system where emission permits are auctioned off to energy-intensive industries and power producers would generate substantial public funding-anywhere from $50 to $300 billion per year-for investment in the new clean energy economy.