Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to join this debate. I thank my colleagues, the Senator from Illinois and certainly the Senator from Alaska for her comments because I think some of what I am going to say will probably overlap in the context of working together to get things done.

Why do I say that is so important? Because she and I worked on a bipartisan energy package that we passed out of the Senate over 2 years ago that had very important, what I would call implementation strategies, for allowing our businesses and our communities to be more cost-competitive when it comes to energy.

Certainly, in the State of Alaska, I can't imagine paying $9 a gallon for fuel just to heat a home or to have your hospital or your school available for kids to go to play in after school or just meet the healthcare needs of a community.

Getting energy right not just in big urban cities like Seattle, which is a lot easier to do--we have net zero buildings, probably some of the best net zero buildings in the country--already establishing how you can create energy and sell it back to the grid and be more energy efficient, but we have to have solutions that are going to meet needs all across the United States of America.

So, good news to hear that the chairwoman of the Energy Committee is planning another energy bill. Hopefully, some of those provisions we worked on 2 years ago, like smart building strategies to help reengineering of energy systems within our buildings to make them more energy efficient, would also go a long way. That is about 40 percent of America's energy use. Every dollar we help a business save in energy costs just gets plugged back into that business's competitiveness in today's economy. I thank her for that, and I look forward to seeing what she and the ranking member, Senator Manchin, push forward, and, certainly, I know we will have our ideas.

We are here to debate about energy policy and getting it right for our future prosperity and our competitiveness. I also agree with my colleague that getting things done is important because I think what we have proven over the last decade, maybe 15 years, is that we can transition to cleaner fuels; we can become more energy independent; we can become more energy efficient; and doing so actually creates new jobs that are higher wage jobs and help us in the future.

What Americans want to know is whether we can make it through this transition without doing great damage to our economy, and I think the results of us working together to pass these legislative ideas in the last decade have proven to be very strong incentives.

First of all, let's talk about incentives writ large, tax incentives. We have been involved with the Finance Committee over the last several years to put in place tax credits that rebalanced our incentives towards the side of renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. In 2008 with my colleague, then-Senator Ensign of Nevada, we were able to work to make sure we were driving down the costs of solar, wind, and biofuels. This legislation, which was extended in the Recovery Act, now helps us with wind supplies to over 6 percent of the U.S. supply.

I know my colleagues in Iowa know how important this is because their State's electricity generates millions of dollars in economic activity. So the fact that we focused on renewables in our tax incentive policy has helped that industry grow and become a very big part of our system.

Today's grid economy is also being modernized, and we have worked to put R&D on the table and allow communities throughout the United States to invest in smart grid technology.

The Presiding Officer comes from a State where there are probably leaders in a lot of renewable energies. I know there are wind projects in the State of Washington from companies in his State that are showing just how efficient wind has become over a long period of time. Who would have originally thought, as I was talking about the Presiding Officer's State of Florida, that we would be talking about wind? You would think I was talking about solar. But this is to show you that the era of distributive generation--that energy can be created from a lot of different sources, put on the grid, moved around cost-effectively, in smart ways, to become more efficient--would help us move toward the future of giving people better opportunities rather than the pollution we see from carbon-intensive areas of the United States.

Even in areas around the United States that still do rely on coal, people are starting to see that renewables are becoming cheaper. The Northern Indiana Public Service Company found that building renewables is cheaper than keeping existing coal plants open. According to the company's 2018 Integrated Resource Plan filed in October, they can save their customers $4 billion over the next 30 years by ramping down the amount of coal they use from two-thirds of their generation mix today, to 15 percent by 2023, to eliminating the use of coal entirely by 2028.

These aren't just places like my State of Washington, where we have, as I said, a lot of technology and a lot of efficiency, but also States that are making the transition off these fossil fuels, showing it is a good investment and is cheaper for their customers.

We know new wind power purchase agreements continue to set records for the lowest cost power, putting downward pressure on electricity costs nationwide. I can't tell you how important that is. Coming from a State where we have had cheap hydropower for decades, decades, and decades, it has built our economy over and over again. I like to say it has helped us store apples. After you pick apples and want to store them for a while, guess what helps? Cheap electricity.

Now we store bits--actual software bits. There are data centers that want cheap electricity. So the very nature of cheap electricity keeps driving Washington's economy over and over.

I know that other States in the Nation would benefit from cheaper electricity sources too. It would help their businesses and it would help their consumers. So today, despite the fact that over 94 percent of all electricity generating capacity added over the past century has been in the renewable area or natural gas, consumers are paying 4 percent less per kilowatt hour for electricity than they did a decade ago. So this diversification off of fossil fuel and this investment in these cleaner sources of energy are helping to lower rates for consumers, and that is why we need to keep going in this direction.

There is a reason that Fortune 500 companies are among the largest renewable energy investors in the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, corporations as diverse as Budweiser, The Gap, and MGM International have invested over $16 billion in wind and solar in 2018, and that is expected to double in 2019. Even the utility industry is waking up to this new reality. The CEO of NextEra, the largest U.S. electricity company in the world by market capitalization, recently told investors that solar and wind, plus storage, will be cheaper than coal, oil, or nuclear.

So this is something that we need to realize. Specifically, he said that the subsidy for wind generation costs will be 2 to 2.5 percent per kilowatt, and large scale solar will only be a little higher than that. Adding storage to this will help us to get those prices down even more.

That is why getting the R&D budget right for the Department of Energy right now and ARPA-E is so critical. We can't cut these programs. We need to make sure that we are continuing to make an investment so that our Nation's electricity sector provides not only more affordable and more reliable energy, but also cleaner energy that will help our atmosphere.

We already now have 3.2 million people working in the clean energy sector. That is nearly three times as many jobs as in the fossil fuel industry. Yet people continue to act like this is an economic debate only about one sector over the other. It is about how we make the transition and how we skill and train people for these future opportunities that support millions of jobs here in the United States of America.

Now, why do I want to continue on that route? Because I want the United States to be a leader in clean energy technology. I don't want to leave this up to our competitors in other countries for them to reap the benefit of better technology and higher wage jobs. I want us to reap these benefits. I have seen many companies that have made their transition in the energy sector from a fossil fuel focus to renewables, and I hope that will continue to happen.

There is another area that we have incented over the last 10 years that has, I think, proven to be a good investment. Senator Hatch and I teamed up in 2007 to introduce legislation providing a $7,500 tax credit for plug-in electric vehicles.

Now, I know that at the time people thought: Well, what is this electric vehicle market all about? But I think we can look here in 2019 and see exactly what it is about. Consumers have more choices, there are more competitors in the market, and we are reducing our dependence on fossil fuel. That is why we need to fight President Trump's budget request to take away those tax incentives for people who buy electric vehicles. We need to continue to move forward on driving down the cost.

Another area that we made progress on in the last decade was fuel efficiency for automobiles. I can tell you what that fight was like in 2007 as we struggled here to move forward. Fuel-efficiency economy increases will result in oil savings in 2030 of about 3 million barrels per day--more than we import from the Persian Gulf and Venezuela combined. So we should not roll back fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. I believe this is a red herring.

We know that fuel efficiency helps consumers to drive to work every day and to afford to fill up in a more economic way. If the Trump administration does roll back these fuel efficiency gains, owners of an average model vehicle from the year 2025 will have to fill up their gas tanks 66 times more and cost drivers over $1,620 more than what they currently pay. So why roll them back?

Another great area of success was establishing a renewable fuel standard back in 2007 in that same bipartisan energy package that was worked on by so many Members of this institution and successfully by so many Members in this institution.

So, to me, it stands in stark contrast to where we are today in this debate, because all of the people working together--our colleagues, the late Senator Ted Stevens, and the late Senator Danny Inouye--played key roles as chairman and ranking member of the Commerce Committee, the EPW Committee, and the Energy Committee. They all added to that legislation in 2007. This bipartisan increase in expansion of the renewable fuel standard was a great way to look at homegrown fuels for the future and making up a larger source of that supply today from renewable clean energy.

So all of these show that we have made progress working together over the last decade or so in a bipartisan way to demonstrate that this transition is necessary, that this transition can be made, that we can make it successfully without hurting our economy, and that we can drive down costs for businesses and consumers and better protect our environment. That is so, so critical.

I am so concerned about the cost of extreme weather and the impact of climate change that I asked my colleague, Senator Collins, to request with me, from the Government Accountability Office, what the costs of these impacts were. Why did I want that information? Because, in the Northwest we are already seeing more damage from fires that have become a constant threat every summer. We have seen a shellfish industry that has basically been threatened by warmer waters. We have seen our challenges to our coastline and changing sea levels. So we wanted that information.

The result of the study showed that current estimates for the impacts as a result of climate change would exceed $1 trillion by 2039. These are costs that we are going to pay in response, mitigation and adaptation. I would rather get about the task of diversifying now and reducing those costs that are going to be paid out by the American taxpayer. We can do better.

So moving toward a cleaner economy off of fossil fuels is what we need to do. With today's energy infrastructure turning over every three or four decades anyways, which will take an investment of $25 to $30 million, making the right choices from the private sector, is with whom we need to partner.

I look forward to working with my colleagues on that, working with my colleague from the Energy Committee, Senator Murkowski, and my colleague Senator Manchin, and all the other colleagues on that committee to help us get these strategies right.

We know the answer to this question. Moving forward on cleaner sources is better for our environment and we have made great strides in the last decade in doing so and driving better economic opportunity for both the consumers and the future energy workers of the United States.

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