Guaranteeing Reliability Through the Interconnection of Dispatchable Power Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WITTMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 1047, the GRID Power Act.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Balderson for leading on this bill and Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie and his staff for their incredible work on this. I thank the chairman for all of his efforts to make sure that we have the energy grid that we need for the future.

Mr. Speaker, we know where the demands are coming from. We know that we have to have the additional high-performance data capability if we are going to lead in artificial intelligence. We know we are in a race with China. We know that, for the future of this Nation, for the future of our children, we want to make sure that we are on the right path. We know that we will use AI for the right purposes. I don't think anybody believes that China is going to use AI for the right purposes.

Across the First Congressional District in the Commonwealth of Virginia, I hear from my constituents about the rising costs of energy, whether it is at the gas pump or their power bills.

I am proud to cosponsor this bill, H.R. 1047, because policies like this ensure a supply of reliable, affordable electricity generation. In turn, we want to do everything we can to lower costs for American households while providing necessary energy.

We have challenges now. The demand is going to increase precipitously in the years to come. How do we make sure we meet that demand? How do we make sure we have not just the generation sources in place but also the transmission systems that work together to make sure that we are working against any sort of large-scale failure scenarios that make a problem for us in the long term? We have to address those problems now.

To achieve this, we have to give our regional transmission organizations and our independent systems operators the necessary authority to prioritize projects that increase interconnectivity, to make sure these systems interconnect so that if there is a problem somewhere, we can bring power back in.

That is what makes our grid today so incredibly important. If there is a breakdown in transmission somewhere, we can find other ways to bring power to people's homes. If there is a breakdown there with generation, we can find other ways to bring power to people's homes, bring power to people's businesses. That is why maintaining and increasing that reliability in the future is key.

Resiliency in that grid is key, too. How do we do that? We make sure that we do even more to empower the decisionmakers to have maximum flexibility to make sure that they can put new improvements to our grid in place to make sure that every bit of power generation capacity and every bit of transmission capacity is ensured so that it gets power to the consumer, to our families, and to our businesses. They rely on that.

We know the interruption that it has. If you have power that goes out at your home or power that goes out at your business, that is a major inconvenience and, in some instances, a major interruption in your business. It can be a major safety factor, too, for families that rely on that power for things that are critical to people's well-being at their homes.

We have to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make this happen. By expediting the resources necessary to advance this reliability, increase the reliability, and increase the resiliency in the grid, we know that this legislation will help achieve that.

We know that this will help us unleash American energy production in vast, new, improved ways. Again, modernize the grid and increase reliability. Those things are key.

We want to make sure that we are doing that because that brings down the cost of living and brings down the cost of power. When things are more reliable, we have more opportunities to provide power in many different ways. That brings down costs. This bill will allow us to do that.

It also helps us restore American energy dominance, where we are using all of the above. We want to use every asset at our avail, both our energy itself, with what we produce there on the grid, and the transmission within the grid.

We know that this is key for our working families and our small businesses. That is the foundation of strong communities, and it starts with making sure that we have a grid that has maximum reliability and maximum resilience. This bill achieves that.

In closing, I urge all of my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, again, I thank Chairman Guthrie for his leadership and Representative Balderson for introducing this bill.

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