Legislation will help deliver clean energy to areas that need it

March 12, 2009

Washington, D.C. – Nevada Senator Harry Reid testified today in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the importance of the Clean Renewable Energy and Economic Development Act, the energy transmission bill he introduced last week. Reid’s proposal will chart a course to a cleaner, greener and smarter national energy transmission policy without sacrificing reliability or affordability.

Following are Senator Reid’s remarks as prepared:

Thank you, Chairman Bingaman, Senator Murkowski and the members of the Committee for your leadership on the critically important issues relating to our national energy policy.

In 1931, the legendary inventor Thomas Edison had some advice for Henry Ford, whose cars were driving up the demand for gasoline.

Edison told Ford – “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I sure hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

More than seven decades have passed since then, and today we find ourselves facing a three-pronged energy crisis, threatening our economy, our environment and our national security.

The leadership of President Obama, the members of this committee, especially under the leadership of Chairman Bingaman, and many elected officials, business leaders and the American people gives us reason for hope that the time for solutions has finally arrived.

President Obama sent a strong message that renewable energy development will be a cornerstone of his administration by placing major investments in clean energy at the center of his economic recovery plan. I am confident that the President’s plan will help create jobs and lay the groundwork for long-term economic growth in Nevada and across America.

We all realize that the President’s recovery plan is just the first of many steps. Our energy crisis has been deepening for decades, and it won’t be solved over night.

But we know one thing for sure: working together – in partnership with the White House, federal, state and local governments, community leaders and the private sector, we can and must meet this moment with the action it requires.

In the tradition of innovation that has always carried our country forward, the private sector and state and local governments are already making great strides. They are the laboratories of creative ideas that we hope to stimulate with the recovery plan’s venture capital and with reforms to our national energy policy.

For instance -

In Pennsylvania, renewable energy has sparked more than $1 billion in private investment.

In Iowa, shuttered factories are now reopening to build parts for wind turbines.

In Nevada, a state I like to call the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy, we already have nearly sixty operating renewable energy projects, producing enough power to heat and cool hundreds of thousands of homes.

And this is just the beginning. The solar power in Nevada and the desert southwest alone could meet our entire country’s energy needs seven times over. The wind energy in the Great Plains, the Midwest and off both of our coasts is similarly abundant. And the potential for geothermal energy, still largely untapped, is simply staggering.

There has been a massive increase in wind energy generation in recent years, creating 38,000 new jobs last year alone.

Solar power is poised for similar growth over the next few years – NV Energy recently announced plans for a 250 MW solar thermal plant in Nevada with plans for molten salt storage to “firm” up that plant’s capacity.

All of this action has been thriving without a sustained federal investment, at least until very very recently.

But absent a permanent, long-term Federal commitment and major policy reforms, we are not close to reaching our national potential. Our landscape is dotted with renewable projects, but until now, few have been connecting the dots.

The way to connect these dots is with a smart transmission grid, using new technologies developed and built here in America, to connect the places that produce renewable energy with the places that will use it.

A smarter grid will make it possible for consumers to save money on their power bills, by making energy efficiency more profitable and transparent, and cost-effectively integrate affordably priced renewable power.

With input from stakeholders on all sides of this important issue, I have introduced S.539, the Clean Renewable Energy and Economic Development Act.

This point of this legislation is to break the logjam that is preventing access to the incredible renewable energy potential that exists in Nevada and across the nation. 

The country needs a plan that will result in the construction of new transmission lines to these renewable energy-rich zones, where the sun, the wind and the heat of the earth are super abundant.

At the other end of those lines, consumers will get affordable and reliable clean power, power that will help us meet our environmental and national security challenges.

By connecting these remote locations to the population centers that consume the overwhelming majority of energy, we will open up vast new markets for a clean, homegrown product that creates American jobs that can never be outsourced.

That’s why my legislation requires the President to designate renewable energy zones. Then, the bill starts a massive national planning effort to maximize the production of renewables and connect these regions to population centers throughout the country.

Building this national smart transmission grid requires us to reform the current siting process.

Now, a developer who is willing to invest in new transmission lines must go through a long and painful process involving many different regulatory hurdles that can add years and tremendous costs to transmission projects.

That’s why my legislation creates a federal backstop transmission siting authority, which gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to move renewable transmission projects along if their progress is stalled.

The next part of my legislation calls for states to make proposals for allocating the cost of building and upgrading transmission lines. We give states the opportunity to succeed on their own, but we also give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the authority to step in, if and when assistance is required to keep projects moving forward and funded equitably. If necessary, the FERC can issue construction permits and the Federal power marketing agencies can issue bonds to finance construction.

My legislation calls for most of the capacity of these new green transmission lines to be available for renewable energy generators. That can be handled easily through an interconnection agreement between a renewable generator and a transmission provider.

Many of us here today strongly support a national renewable electricity standard and a carbon cap. I believe we are moving closer toward those critical goals. But until we achieve them, we should act now to set performance requirements for our new smart transmission grid – both in terms of how it works and what we attach to it.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to see that many parts of my bill have been incorporated into the majority staff draft, especially the components that address regional transmission planning and cost allocation.

I look forward to continuing to work with the Committee as we develop legislation that empowers our states while ensuring that we achieve the necessary goal of integrating renewable energy into our electrical grid.

We have not arrived at a final product, but rather, an excellent framework. As this legislation moves forward, all sides will have an opportunity to take part in the debate. I am confident that this process will only strengthen the final product.

In recent months, support for the steps I have outlined – and the ultimate goal of ending our devastating addiction to oil – have really started to gel.

At our clean energy summits in Las Vegas last August and here in Washington, DC last month, we have seen an extraordinary level of bipartisan problem-solving. This Committee will play a critical role in keeping us on that productive path.

There will come a day when our children and grandchildren look back upon this moment in history. They will see that we knew the scope of this multiple-pronged crisis, better than any generation before us, and we took action to solve it.

The work of this Committee, the leadership of our new President, the innovation of the private sector and the mandate of the American people all give me confidence that generations who follow us will find that we answered this challenge and left their inheritance – our world – better than we found it.