Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act
Floor Speech
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As my colleague Senator Murkowski said, I am thrilled to be here on the floor of the Senate today after 3 years of work with Senator Portman and so many other people to be talking about the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act.
I wish to begin by thanking Chairman Wyden and Ranking Member Murkowski for all of the support and great work the Energy Committee has done to help get this bill to the floor.
As they pointed out, and as I know the Presiding Officer knows, the Energy Committee in the Senate has been very bipartisan. I had the opportunity to spend my first 4 years here on the Energy Committee and I can attest to that. I know what great work they have done. The fact they have moved so many bills through the committee already speaks to the consensus they have been able to build on the committee around energy policy. Thank you both very much for all of that great work.
Thank you to my partner in this effort, Senator Portman of Ohio. He is not on floor right now, but I sort of claim him in New Hampshire because he went to Dartmouth, so we figure he has some New Hampshire roots. We have worked in a partnership on this legislation. It has been a very bipartisan effort.
It reflects what I believe is an affordable approach to the use of energy efficiency technologies. It will help create private sector jobs. It will save businesses and consumers money. It will reduce pollution, and it will make our country more energy independent.
I know we are all very aware of the crisis in Syria and how that looms over this discussion. It couldn't be more timely over how we can make this country more energy independent.
This bill, which Senator Portman and I have been working on for 3 years, has been the result of years of meetings and negotiations, of broad stakeholder outreach. It has been an effort to craft the most effective piece of energy legislation, efficiency legislation, with the greatest chance of passing both Chambers of Congress and of being signed into law.
The legislation will have a swift and measurable benefit to our economy and our environment. In fact, as Senator Wyden pointed out, we had a recent study by experts at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which found this legislation, if it is passed, has the potential to create 136,000 domestic jobs by 2025. They did a study in the last Congress, when we first introduced the bill, which showed in addition to that job creation, it would also save consumers $4 billion by 2020 and be the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road. It is a huge benefit to our environment and to job creation, which is probably at the top of our agenda right now, and also for savings to consumers.
Simply put, as my colleagues have said, we need a comprehensive national energy policy. We have been overly dependent on foreign oil. We have been reliant on an outdated energy infrastructure. This is a situation that hurts business and that also gives our overseas competitors an advantage.
We have to think about an "all of the above'' strategy, as everybody has commented, that utilizes a wide range of energy sources: natural gas, oil, nuclear, and renewables such as wind, biomass, and solar. This will give us a stronger and more stable economy. We can't just focus on the supply side, we also need to think about how we consume the energy once we have it, the demand side.
Efficiency is the cheapest, fastest way to address our energy needs. Energy savings techniques and technologies, lower costs--they free up capital that allows business to expand and our economy to grow. I have been to so many businesses throughout New Hampshire in the last 3 years that, because of their ability to save on their energy costs, have been able to stay competitive and have been able to add jobs. This has a real benefit to our economy and to businesses.
Efficiency, as I said, is the fastest way to address our energy needs. I think a lot of times people think about energy saving and energy efficiency as turning down the thermostat, turning off the lights, putting on a sweater, but energy efficiency today is about a whole lot more than that. We can start by improving our efficiency by installing ready and proven technologies. These are off the shelf. They are already available, such as modern heating and cooling systems, smart meters, computer-controlled thermostats, and low-energy lighting. These are all available today for the benefit of people who wish to save on their energy consumption and their energy bills.
There are substantial opportunities that exist across all sectors of our economy to conserve energy and to create good-paying private sector jobs. As we have already said, I think efficiency has a great shot at passing both the House and Senate and becoming law. Energy efficiency has emerged as an excellent example of bipartisan and affordable opportunity to immediately grow our economy and improve our energy security.
In addition to being affordable, efficiency is widely supported because its benefits aren't confined to a certain fuel source or a particular region of the country. So much of the energy debate over the last few years has been about who benefits, whether it is fossil fuels, alternatives, whether it is the Northeast, the South, the West. Everybody benefits from energy efficiency. It is one of the policy areas where we can come to a real agreement.
It is no wonder that this legislation, Shaheen-Portman, enjoys such large and diverse support. It has received more than 250 endorsements from a wide range of 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. These are the types of nontraditional alliances that have helped us get this bill to the floor.
Senator Portman and I worked with diverse groups to craft this year's bill, and we maintained a transparent and open process in which we tried to make sure all stakeholders had a meaningful opportunity to comment on existing and proposed provisions and to suggest their substantive additions. So using that process of coalition building, we were able to find common ground on a number of important provisions, including commercial and residential building efficiency codes, workforce training, and language that aims to create a more robust public-private partnership between DOE's Advanced Manufacturing Office and industrial energy consumers.
To talk a little about what is actually in the legislation, this bill provides incentives and support but, as we have all said, no mandates for residential and commercial buildings in order to cut energy use. That is very important because buildings consume about 40 percent of the energy used in the United States.
The bill strengthens voluntary national model building codes to make new homes and commercial buildings more energy efficient, and it works with State and private industry to make the code-writing process more transparent.
The legislation trains the next generation of workers in energy efficient commercial building design and operation through university-based building training and research assessment centers.
Shaheen-Portman assists our industrial manufacturing sector, which consumes more energy than any other sector of the U.S. economy. The bill would direct the Department of Energy to work closely with private sector industrial partners to encourage research, development, and commercialization of innovative energy efficient technology and processes for industrial application. This is something we heard very clearly from businesses throughout the country. They really need and they want a more collaborative effort with the Department of Energy. They want to feel as though the Department of Energy is working with them. So hopefully these provisions will help make that happen.
It also helps businesses reduce energy costs and become more competitive by incentivizing the use of more energy efficient electric motors and transformers.
It also establishes a DOE voluntary program called SupplySTAR, which is modeled on something that has been a great success, the ENERGY STAR Program, to help make companies more aware of their supply chains and how to make them more efficient as well.
The legislation requires the Federal Government, which is the single largest user of energy in the country, to adopt more efficient building standards and smart metering technology. The bill would require the Federal Government to adopt energy-saving technologies and operations for computers. Our data centers are huge users of energy. It would allow Federal agencies to use existing funds to update plans for new Federal buildings using the most current building efficiency standards.
Finally, as has been said, this legislation is fully offset, so there is no new spending in this bill. We reallocate authorization from existing programs.
To conclude--and I know we are going to have a lot of amendments to this bill--we have a number of bipartisan amendments that are going to make this bill better, that will make it more substantive, and I look forward to those amendments and to the debate we are going to have. I think this is a bipartisan, affordable, and I believe widely supported first step as we begin addressing our Nation's very real energy needs, particularly not just on the supply side but on the demand side.
As I have said, a lot of people have worked very hard to get this bill to the floor, and while I am not going to walk through who all of those people are, I again thank Chairman Wyden and Ranking Member Murkowski for all of their support, and I thank Majority Leader Reid and Republican Leader McConnell for their support in reaching an agreement to get the bill to the floor.
I also thank three staff members whose hard work has really made this possible--first, someone who was in my office earlier but who has now moved on, Trent Bauserman, who worked very hard to get us started on the legislation; Robert Diznoff, who has now taken over in my office to work on the bill; and Steve Kittredge from the office of Senator Portman. Without the three of them and without all of the other staffers both in my office and in the office of Senator Portman and all of the people on the committee who have worked so hard, we would not be here to have this debate today.
So I thank all of them, and I look forward to hearing the amendments and the robust discussion on the floor and to continuing to work with my colleague Senator Portman as we try to move this bill through the process.
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Thank you, Mr. President.
I want to commend Senator Klobuchar on her efforts. This is another one of the great bipartisan amendments that has been worked on to add to this energy efficiency legislation. It shows how great the opportunity is for this legislation to provide for savings for people, to get people engaged in the idea of how much energy they are using and what the costs of that energy are, and also what the environmental benefits and the benefits to consumers and the benefits to our national security are in encouraging energy efficiency. So I want to commend her and thank her for all of her efforts, and we will continue to have this discussion on the floor as we wait for some kind of an agreement from Senator Vitter.
Thank you.
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Before the Senator from Rhode Island leaves, I wanted to commend him for this effort. I think it is a great proposal. I haven't had a chance to look at all the details, so I look forward to that, but using performance contracting to provide for savings on energy costs is a very effective way to address the upfront costs for these kinds of retrofits.
As the Senator points out, the person who is doing the contracting--the private company--is assuming the burden of those costs. Yet the benefits are going to taxpayers. Ultimately, the contractor that does the retrofits is also going to benefit over the long term, and those savings will keep coming back year after year. So once the initial cost is paid off, taxpayers will continue to get those savings year after year.
As Governor, we started retrofitting State buildings exactly this way, and it saved the taxpayers of New Hampshire hundreds of thousands of dollars a year--it is still saving them that--and also thousands of pounds of pollution because, as we know, 40 percent of our energy is used by buildings. So if we save on that energy use in buildings, then that saves not only on those costs, but it also saves on the pollution that comes from heating and cooling those buildings.
So I commend the Senator for his effort and I look forward to having a chance to debate it on the floor and to having a chance to review the proposal in greater detail.
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