Promoting Energy Savings in Residential Buildings and Industry -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

Mrs. SHAHEEN. I assume the question is, will this bill [the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act] pass the Senate?

Mr. PORTMAN. Will this bill pass the Senate is a question that I pose to my colleague from New Hampshire.

Mrs. SHAHEEN. I would say absolutely it will pass the Senate. It will do that because it represents almost 3 years of meetings, negotiations, and broad stakeholder outreach in an effort to craft the most effective piece of legislation with the greatest chance of passing not only the Senate but the House as well so it can be signed into law.

This bill, as has been explained so well, is a bipartisan effort that is designed to boost the use of energy efficienct technologies. It will help create private sector jobs. It will save businesses and consumers money. It will reduce pollution. It will make our country more energy independent.

This legislation will have a swift and measurable benefit to our economy and our environment. As Senator Portman said, a study by experts at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that last year's version would have saved consumers $4 billion. This may be a little hard to read on the chart, but you can see it reduces energy costs. In doing so, it saves consumers $4 billion a year. It would create about 80,000 jobs, if it were passed, by 2020. It would also be the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road.

The United States needs a comprehensive national energy policy. We are too dependent on foreign oil. We are overly reliant on an outdated energy infrastructure. We need to utilize a wide range of energy sources, including natural gas, oil, nuclear, and renewable such as wind, biomass, and solar.

But we cannot just focus on the supply side. We also need to think about how we consume the energy once we have it. Efficiency is the cheapest, fastest way to reduce our energy use. Energy-saving techniques and technologies lower costs, they free up capital that allows businesses to expand and create jobs and allows our economy to grow. We can start by improving our efficiency now by installing ready and proven technologies, things such as modern heating and cooling systems, smart meters, computer-controlled thermostats, and lower energy lighting, to name a few.

There are substantial opportunities that exist across all sectors of our economy to conserve energy, to create good-paying private sector jobs. In fact, there are countless examples of energy efficiency success stories in the private sector that I have had the good fortune to see as I have traveled around New Hampshire.

I visited small retail businesses, manufacturing companies, ski areas, apartment complexes, and municipal buildings throughout New Hampshire. They are all using energy-efficient technologies to lower costs, to improve working conditions and, most important, to stay competitive.

Not long ago I had the opportunity to visit a company on the seacoast in New Hampshire called High Liner Foods. It is a seafood processing plant. It requires a lot of energy to operate. In fact, at one point the 180,000-square-foot facility consumed roughly 2 megawatts of power at any given time during normal operations. So next to the core costs of personnel and fish, because it is a fish processing plant, energy was their biggest expense. But by installing efficient lighting, new boilers, various demand-response techniques such as adjusting its lighting to dim when no employees are in the area, establishing HVAC setpoints, High Liner Foods is making great strides in reducing energy consumption. It has allowed them to expand their footprint in the State and to be more cost-effective in their production.

This week I had the opportunity to visit the first LEED-certified auto dealership in New Hampshire. It is the first Toyota auto dealership that is LEED certified in New England, which I know the Presiding Officer will appreciate, being from the neighboring State of Massachusetts. They have implemented a number of effective energy-efficient initiatives to cut their energy cost, including the installation of solar panels, efficient lighting, and an impressive energy dashboard to monitor energy use throughout their entire service. Their customers can come in, they can touch this interactive dashboard, they can see what is going on throughout the physical plant.

I have also visited some great New Hampshire companies that also are producing energy-efficient technology. We have a company in New Hampshire called Warner Power, which has made the first breakthrough in transformers in over 100 years. Studies show that inefficiency in transformers results in a loss of about 5 percent of all electricity generated in the United States. With the wide-scale use of Warner Power's innovation, the Hexaformer, and their control system technology, the company estimates that 1.5 percent of all transformer energy losses could be eliminated. This would save the country 60 terawatts of electricity a year. That is equal to about five times New Hampshire's entire annual electricity consumption. So energy efficiency is an excellent example of a bipartisan and affordable approach that can immediately grow our economy and improve our energy security.

In addition to being affordable, efficiency is widely supported because its benefits are not confined to a certain fuel source or a particular region of the country. It is clearly one of those areas where we can all come to some common agreement, whether we support fossil fuels or whether we support alternatives such as wind and solar. So it is no wonder, as Senator Portman said, that this legislation enjoys such a broad, diverse coalition of support. It has received more than 250 endorsements from businesses, environmental groups, think tanks, and trade associations, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers to the National Resources Defense Council and the Painters Union. These are the types of nontraditional alliances that have helped us to get this bill to the floor.

The legislation provides a roadmap to create and implement a national strategy to increase the use of energy efficiency technologies in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors of our economy.

It provides incentives and support, not mandates, for residential and commercial buildings in order to cut energy use. This is very important because buildings consume about 40 percent of all energy in the United States. The bill strengthens voluntary national model building codes--I would emphasize that these are voluntary--to make new homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient, while working with States and private industry to make the code-writing process more transparent.

It also trains the next generation of workers in energy-efficient commercial building design and operation. The legislation also assists our industrial manufacturing sector, which consumes more energy than any other sector of the U.S. economy. It directs the Department of Energy to work closely with the private sector industrial partners to encourage research, development, and commercialization of innovative energy-efficient technology and processes for industrial applications.

It helps businesses reduce energy costs and become more competitive by incentivizing the use of more energy-efficient electric motors and transformers. It establishes a voluntary program called SupplySTAR, which is modeled on the successful ENERGY STAR Program, to help make company supply chains more efficient.

Finally, the legislation requires the Federal Government, the single largest user of energy in the country, to adopt more efficient building standards and smart metering technology. It requires the Federal Government to adopt energy-saving technologies and operations for computers. It allows Federal agencies to use existing funds to update plans for new Federal buildings using the most current building efficiency standards.

The best part, as Senator Portman said, is the cost of this legislation is fully offset. It reallocates funding that has not been used from existing programs.

I thank Chairman Ron Wyden and his ranking member Lisa Murkowski from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee for their great support in getting this bill to the floor. This is a bipartisan, affordable, and widely supported piece of legislation. Most importantly, it is an effective step in addressing our Nation's very real energy needs. I thank Senator Portman, Senator Wyden, and Senator Murkowski for all of their help with this bill. I look forward to debating the bill on the floor of the Senate, to listening to amendments, and to passing this bill out to the House and finally having it signed into law. I hope my colleagues will join me in this debate.

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