Vice President Biden Releases Report on Recovery Act Impact on Innovation

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Office of the President
August 24, 2010

New Analysis Finds U.S. Now On-Track to Achieve Four Major Science and Technology Breakthroughs Due to Recovery Act 

Vice President Joe Biden today unveiled a new report, “The Recovery Act: Transforming the American Economy through Innovation,” which finds that the Recovery Act’s $100 billion investment in innovation is not only transforming the economy and creating new jobs, but helping accelerate significant advances in science and technology that cut costs for consumers, save lives and help keep America competitive in the 21st century economy. 

“From the beginning, we have been a nation of discovery and innovation – and today we continue in that tradition as Recovery Act investments pave the way for game-changing breakthroughs in transportation, energy and medical research,” said Vice President Biden.  “We’re planting the seeds of innovation, but private companies and the nation’s top researchers are helping them grow, launching entire new industries, transforming our economy and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the process.”

According to this new analysis, the U.S. is now on-track to achieve four major innovation breakthroughs thanks to Recovery Act investments:

• Cutting the cost of solar power in half by 2015, putting it on par with the cost of retail electricity from the grid.
• Cutting the cost of batteries for electric vehicles by 70 percent between 2009 and 2015, putting the lifetime cost of an electric vehicle on-par with that of its non-electric counterpart.
• Doubling U.S. renewable energy generation capacity and U.S. renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012, a breakthrough that would not be possible without the Recovery Act.
• Bringing the cost of a personal human genome map to under $1,000 in five years, allowing researchers to sequence 50 human genomes for the same cost as sequencing just one today.

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