Promoting Opportunities to Widen Electrical Resilience Act of 2024

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 9541, the bill I cosponsored with Representative Ezell. This bill empowers publicly owned electric utilities to implement hazard mitigation improvements during disaster recovery.

When disasters strike, they leave a trail of destruction, including damaged energy infrastructure that needs to be immediately repaired to restore power.

At the same time, this can present an opportunity to improve the resilience of power infrastructure to reduce the risk of outages in the future. Unfortunately, current law prevents FEMA from reimbursing utilities for hazard mitigation as they make temporary disaster repairs. This leads to wasted opportunity, more frequent power outages, and higher costs passed on to ratepayers.

Commonsense solutions like H.R. 9541 are more critical than ever to keep energy costs low for American families. This bill maximizes FEMA's resources and helps communities protect critical infrastructure, leading to lower costs for utilities and families in the wake of future disasters.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. HOYLE of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, the cost of recovering from increasingly frequent severe weather events often raises the price of America's electric bills.

This bill will help public power make their systems more resilient at the time of repair, increasing efficiency and cutting overall costs.

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