Ratepayer Protection Act of 2015

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank my colleague, the gentleman from Kentucky, for bringing this important bill to the floor to empower States to protect consumers from higher electric rates and to ensure grid reliability. In fact, when I was in the State legislature back in Michigan, I served as the vice chair of our Energy and Technology Committee and spent a lot of time and work on grid reliability and cost issues.

Under the clean power plan, the EPA would set mandatory carbon dioxide emission levels for each State and require that they submit State plans to meet their EPA-established ``goals.''

While I have many concerns about the proposed rule, I am offering this amendment to highlight how the EPA's approach to calculating emissions actually discourages the kind of emission reductions that it is intended to promote.

Here is how. The EPA's compliance formula does not include a way to calculate the benefits of clean energy storage. Michigan is a prime example of the importance of energy storage via the Ludington Pumped Storage reservoir in west Michigan, in the Second District.

Ludington Pumped Storage was the largest pumped storage hydroelectric facility in the world when it was constructed. I remember as a young man, my dad was in construction, and we would do Sunday drives an hour and a half north just to see progress on this. It is an 842-acre reservoir that is 2 1/2 miles long and holds 27 billion gallons of water. In the last couple of years, it now includes a wind farm with 56 turbines that are generating an additional 100 megawatts. Ludington can generate up to 1,872 megawatts, which is enough electricity to serve a community of 1.4 million residential customers.

Here is how the pump storage works. At night, when electric rates are low--and oftentimes the wind is blowing in west Michigan, and those turbines are going--Ludington's reversible turbines down at the lake level pump water up the 363-foot hill from Lake Michigan to the reservoir. Then, during the day, when electric demand is high, the reservoir releases water to flow downhill and it turns the turbines to make carbon-free electricity. And that is very, very helpful, obviously especially in the summertime when we have peak times.

In fact, when I was in the State legislature, I was standing next to those turbines and they got the call that they needed peak electricity because a substation had gone down in southeast Michigan. Literally, within 10 minutes, those turbines were spinning and producing electricity and putting it back out on the grid, thereby saving a whole lot of expenses they were going to look at in needing to go out on the MISO system to purchase that electricity.

In addition to it being carbon-free, there are no other emissions being pumped from the storage generation either.

Ironically, the proposed rule would penalize States like Michigan and Virginia that have prudently invested in energy storage technology because the emissions and megawatt hours from plants used to charge the system are included in the EPA's equation. However, the megawatt hours discharged from the storage system are not. Thus, according to the EPA, a State's emissions intensity actually increases if they utilize clean energy storage. That is the exact opposite of what I hope is the EPA's goal of this rule.

This amendment simply encourages the EPA to explicitly authorize States to include clean energy storage in their compliance plans.

I encourage my colleagues to support this bipartisan amendment and the underlying bill so that States can best protect their residents from the significant economic and reliability impact the proposed rule could have.

At this time, I yield to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee), my colleague.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source