Creation Of New Jobs Through Clean Energy Technology

Floor Speech

Mr. HEINRICH. I want to thank my friend from Colorado.

Madam Speaker, we formed the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition in the 111th Congress because we believe in America's promise to become the global leader in energy and environmental strategies of the 21st century. Leadership and innovation is the hallmark of American success. In 1961 when President John F. Kennedy said that our country would lead the world by landing an American on the Moon, within 8 years his goal was achieved with the Apollo project. Today that same innovation is present in our emerging clean energy economy.

Madam Speaker, the opportunity for America to create thousands of clean energy jobs that will build our 21st century economy cannot be understated. Evidence of that clean energy job growth, a key component of our local economic recovery, is already visible on the ground in communities like New Mexico's First Congressional District, which I represent.

Part of this clean energy cluster growth is a result of the vast natural resources that New Mexico has to share. We are second in the Nation in solar energy capacity and 12th in the Nation for wind energy production potential, but we also have invested heavily in our human capital. One example of this success is the work being done in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, which has been at the center of multiple renewable energy advancements across our country, including the creation of a high-performing biofuel that can be used in military aircraft. With Sandia's help, thousands of jobs in new energy fields have been created in our community by companies like Advent Solar and EMCORE, which makes concentrated solar photovoltaics. Just a month ago I participated in the grand opening of a $100 million Schott Solar manufacturing plant in Albuquerque, which is on track to eventually employ 1,400 people. On the west side of the First Congressional District, Solar Array Ventures is building a factory that will employ 1,000 people; and in the rural east side of our congressional district, hundreds of people have been at work with good-paying jobs on the near complete 100-megawatt High Lonesome Mesa wind project.

Madam Speaker, these jobs are part of a thriving clean energy cluster that is leading our community towards economic recovery. I'm proud to report that Albuquerque's clean energy job growth recently earned us a second-place national ranking in Kiplinger's 2009 list. Albuquerque was recognized for leading the Nation in key job growth areas of tomorrow. The potential to create these kinds of clean energy jobs across our Nation cannot be denied, and I am proud that the 111th Congress has already started investing in our clean energy future.

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, we invested more than $60 billion to help jump-start the clean energy jobs of tomorrow. These investments include building transmission lines to carry solar and wind to communities in need, improving battery technology, training a new clean energy workforce, and increasing energy efficiency to help our country use less energy while we strengthen our economy.

I'm proud to have sponsored the Clean Energy Promotion Act, a bill that will expedite the review of wind and solar energy projects on our public Bureau of Land Management lands. I also cosponsored the national renewable energy standard legislation that is included in the current legislation to increase our country's generation of energy from renewable sources.

Madam Speaker, in New Mexico's First Congressional District and across the country, we are at a crossroads. We can either cede leadership and clean energy innovation to nations like Germany, which has the highest solar generation of any country in the world even though it only has the same average solar exposure as the State of Alaska; or we can jump-start the American clean energy industry, spurred by the same spirit of innovation that put us on the Moon, to put Americans to work in clean energy careers, building solar panels and wind turbines. Let's choose the path of innovation, the path that has led to American success throughout our history. Now is the time to take bold action on our energy policy.

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Mr. HEINRICH. You know, I think this whole issue of research and development is absolutely critical, because we have fallen behind the entire world in things that we were at the very front edge of just a few years ago. We can do so much better. And when you look around at the American innovation in New York, in New Mexico, in Virginia and Colorado, there is no more innovative people in the world than the American entrepreneur.

You know, I was lucky to have the majority leader visit my district last year, so I took him out to Sandia National Labs, one of the places involved in basic research and development, that is rebuilding our energy economy and pushing us forward to the leadership position in the world that we deserve.

One of the things that we looked at Sandia National Labs was actually a process where they take solar energy and a carbon dioxide feedstock, what is currently a problem, it is pollution, it is warming our planet, and utilize that to make liquid fuels, high-density energy fuels that can then be used as an energy storage medium, just like the advanced batteries you were talking about.

There are people doing research today on a much more efficient method of hydrolysis that would then utilize hydrogen as the output, basically do in the energy field what trees do every day, take sunlight and then store that as energy in a way that you can use.

Take sunlight, and then store that as energy in a way that you can use. And if any country in the world should be leading these efforts, it's the United States. And it's time for us to take back our rightful position, leading the world on the future of clean jobs. But we can only do that through changes in policy. If we sit back and watch as the battery research moves to Korea and Japan and other places, we will be buying the advanced vehicles from those countries. And instead, we need to be supporting the advance battery research that's being done in places like New York.

In my own home district we were doing research on batteries at Sandia National Laboratories to make sure that we do a better job increasing the density and the safety of these things. So, this is a huge opportunity for us.

As you said, it's a job creator. And the cost, the opportunity cost of not acting, really hits us in the West, I think, probably more than anyplace except for maybe where you have a coast line. We are reliant for our economy on water, on the water that falls as snow pack, just like it does in your district in Colorado, Congressman Polis, and that water flows down hills and it runs our farms and it runs our factories. It keeps our rivers alive.

And yet we have seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of snow pack that actually reaches places like Albuquerque because it's evaporating earlier, you know, temperatures are rising. The Tehemas Mountains in New Mexico have seen something like a seven-plus degree Fahrenheit swing in temperatures over time. That's impacting forest fires. It's less water for all of us to use for economic activity. And so the cost of not doing anything, of not implementing this bill, which is basically an Apollo project for energy independence and jobs in this country, is so much greater than the cost of acting.

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Mr. HEINRICH. That word, independence, I think, is absolutely critical because this legislation will give us the independence that, as Americans, we crave. And I can say, you know, one of the pieces of this is renewable energy portfolio standard, something that says all the utilities are going to create a certain portion of their power from renewable and clean sources, we've had that for a number of years in New Mexico; and it's worked remarkably well. In concert with photovoltaic technology, this spring, you know, starting March or April, I started getting a credit from P&M resources that you mentioned earlier because I've got solar panels tied into the system, and during the day when we're not home, we're selling power back to the grid at the very time when everybody's turning on their air conditioner. It is innovative solutions like that that are already working in so many places that are going to give people freedom from those energy bills and independence from this international and foreign oil that sucks so much money out of our economy in the United States.

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Mr. HEINRICH. I think what my friend from Virginia is describing is actually a very conservative position. And I think that one of the ironies in all of this is when you realize that we have nonrenewable resources and they're very valuable--they cost us billions and billions of dollars in our economy--to use less of them, to stretch those out and to utilize them more effectively, that is a fundamentally conservative position, not to waste the resources that God has given us, but to utilize them as efficiently as we possibly can.

You know, I remember during the campaign of 2008 there was this whole issue of the tire gauge, and hearing Rush Limbaugh just make fun of this idea that a tire gauge could be of any value at all. And when you think about the fact that we will fight like dogs and cats in this Chamber over this little postage stamp of oil and gas in the North Slope of Alaska, the same amount of which could be conserved in a few years if people would use those tire gauges, that is, I think, a fundamental irony in all of this.

We're going to continue to use oil and gas; we're probably going to continue to use coal for a number of years. We should use those nonrenewable resources as conservatively as we possibly can.

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Mr. HEINRICH. I think not only on the steel front will it help their competitiveness, the way it's structured actually rewards them for being more efficient. We produce steel in this country with far less of a carbon footprint than they do in China. And one of the things that the incentives in this legislation does is it will incentivize spending money on capital investment that will continue to bring down the carbon footprint and increase the efficiency, making steel in this country more competitive worldwide in a way that is even compliant with the WTO. So we will actually be improving the competitiveness of the American steel industry instead of, once again, shipping those jobs and ceding them to another country.

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