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Hillary Clinton Says She Will Give Her Green Donors 'More Help from the Government'

November 4, 2015

Hillary Clinton said Tuesday she will give more taxpayer money to her green donors if elected president.

"I met in Chicago with clean, renewable energy businesses, and they’re ready to go," Clinton said at a campaign event in Iowa. "But they need some help from the government."

The Washington Examiner reported that Clinton was referring to a "$2,700-a-head fundraiser at the home of Tonya and Michael Polsky, the CEO and president of Invenergy, and hosted by four others whose companies received ‘help from the government’ in the form of $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded cash grants to boost wind, solar and hydroelectric-based projects."

Polsky, a major Democratic fundraiser, has benefited from more than $662 million in government subsidies to his company.

Clinton admitted at the campaign event that renewable energy corporations needed to be subsidized by the government because their product is "still not at the stage where it can go on its own."

Renewable energy sources like solar photovoltaic and wind are expected to remain significantly more expensive than conventional energy sources for the foreseeable future, although they have become more affordable as a result of technological advances.

The Energy Information Agency, for example, estimates that solar PV plants entering service in 2020 will cost 66 percent more than conventional natural gas plants. Offshore wind installations are estimated to cost a whopping 161.8 percent more than conventional natural gas plants.

Clinton’s goal of producing "enough clean energy to power every home in America," then, would entail a significant increase in prices for consumers—or a significant outlay of taxpayer dollars to her friends running renewable energy corporations.

Transcript below:

After that, I want us to produce enough clean energy to power every home in America. If you take the Iowa example, it is more than doable. I met, in Chicago, with clean, renewable energy businesses, and they’re ready to go, but they need some help from the government because we have to extend the production tax credit and the investment tax credit that make this work—that make this worthy of investment, because we’re still not at the stage where it can go on its own.

Of course, oil and gas aren’t at that stage either, because we subsidize them to a huge amount of money every year. So I want us to phase out the oil and gas subsidies and phase in the clean energy subsidies so we can make this transition. So those are two areas where we can create a lot of jobs.