France joins alternative, emerging bandwagon with $1.7B investment

In France, the country’s Environment and Energy Management Agency has launched a program that will inject $1.71 billion into alternative fuels and emerging technologies. The government will allocate $1.14 billion in loans and $570 million in subsidies through the next four years. The money will go to biofuels, carbon capture and storage, green chemistry, and solar, marine and geothermal energy – which hopefully will not stay at the end of the list. The loans and subsidies will go to research demonstration, pre-commercialization and technological testing stages between research and commercial development.