Establishment Of A Demonstration Program On Gas Turbines

Floor Speech

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Mr. TONKO. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

My bill establishes a research, development, and demonstration program through the Department of Energy to improve the efficiency of natural gas turbines used in electric power generation systems. The Department had a similar public-private partnership research program in the 1990s that led to technologies used in turbines today. Resurrecting this capability is essential if our country is going to be the energy technology leader of the world.

Currently, the United States uses natural gas for nearly 20 percent of our power generation, and with the recent discovery of natural gas in different regions of our country, that percentage is most likely to grow.

Efficiency is paramount in turbines. The most advanced combined-cycle gas turbine systems today are capable of reaching somewhere near 60 percent efficiency. The goal of this bill is to develop systems that achieve up to 65 percent efficiency.

The energy and fuel savings created by more efficient turbines will help ratepayers save more than a billion dollars per year in fuel costs alone. Deployment of 65 percent efficient gas turbines throughout the country would result in significant reductions in fuel use, leading to savings in electricity costs of some $180 billion through the year 2040.

Energy efficiency should be our fuel of choice, a fuel we need to drill and mine like we currently drill for oil and mine coal. That's exactly what this bill does, Mr. Speaker. It makes energy efficiency our fuel of choice.

Just 1 percentage point improvement in efficiency would result in CO

2 emissions reductions of 4.4 million tons per year, as well as palpable reductions in NO

X, SOx, and other harmful emissions.

In addition to the environmental benefits and energy and fuel savings, this bill promotes United States technology leadership, putting our country in a position to assume a greater share of the worldwide energy market by creating and retaining high-value domestic jobs in turbine manufacturing. Furthermore, many technologies developed under this program can be retrofitted onto the existing fleet of turbines.

This program will create thousands of domestic jobs in a variety of technology sectors. There are potential jobs in our labs, jobs in our factories, and jobs in our construction sector. This bill is a positive step toward restoring our energy, economy, creating clean-energy jobs, and enhancing our energy security.

Getting this legislation to the floor today would not have been possible without the help of my colleagues on the House Science and Technology Committee. After the full committee markup of this bill, we continued to work to address the concerns of my colleagues, Mr. Hall, Mr. Bilbray, and Ms. Kosmas. With their help and leadership, we were able to expand the scope of this bill to include simple-cycle turbine systems, in addition to combined-cycle.

I want to thank them for their suggestions and working with me to create an even stronger bill. In so doing, we also modestly expanded the authorization levels for the bill to reflect the inclusion of simple-cycle turbine systems.

I want to thank Ranking Member Hall, his staff, and all of my Science and Technology Committee colleagues for continuing to work with me to improve this bill. Our chairman has been most helpful.

Finally, I also want to thank Mr. Inglis for understanding the importance of this legislation and joining me as a cosponsor of this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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