Energy Policy Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I wish to start by congratulating the chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the senior Senator from Alaska, for her leadership on this bill and so many other issues. She is a testament to how the Senate should operate. She is a testament to the tradition of bipartisanship that characterizes this body when it is behaving properly. I thank her and congratulate her for her leadership on this issue and many others.

I also thank the ranking member, Senator Cantwell from Washington State, for her leadership on this and many other issues. They have formed a good and productive partnership.

Our energy system is undergoing a fundamental transformation. In the last 8 years, wind power capacity has grown by more than 400 percent, and solar capacity has grown by more than 2,500 percent. In 2015, wind and solar comprised 61 percent of new generation capacity. Last year in the United States, by far the majority of new generation was clean energy. So what has happened is that the clean energy revolution is no longer aspirational. It is no longer something people put in a bullet point in their campaign brochure or as a talking point in a debate. It is actually happening. It is actually real, and it is across the country. We drive more hybrids and electric vehicles and increasingly use efficient appliances and manufacturing equipment. We have made incredible progress in driving down the costs of clean energy, but we cannot let this progress stall out. We need to modernize our infrastructure in order to integrate greater amounts of renewable energy and save money for consumers through energy efficiency.

This bill is a positive step in transitioning our energy system from the 19th and 20th centuries into the 21st. There are a number of provisions that are worth highlighting.

First, the bill proposes $500 million in research and development for grid-scale storage. This will allow us to use even more electricity from renewable sources. There is no doubt we are going to continue to need baseload power, but the assumptions about the percentage of baseload power that we need in order to have good power quality across our grids are changing. For instance, in the State of Hawaii the basic assumption was that you couldn't have more than about 15 percent of penetration of intermittent renewable energy. Well, we now have parts of our grid that are 35 percent, 45 percent, renewable energy. So the old assumptions are being thrown out the window, but no doubt we are going to continue to need to have Federal research and private sector research into this question of how much intermittent renewable energy a grid can accommodate without sacrificing power quality. This $500 million investment is going to be a big help toward that.

This bill will also continue investments in grid modernization that will help to smooth the integration of distributed renewable generation. This will make a real difference in improving reliability while reducing individuals' reliance on fossil fuels.

This bill would also permanently reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. This is not just the most successful conservation program in our Nation's history--and that would be a good enough reason to permanently reauthorize it--it is also an economic driver, returning $4 in economic value for every $1 invested. Amendment No. 2965

Last, but certainly not least, this bill increases funding for energy research and development at the Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy, which is desperately needed because only the Federal Government can undertake the kind of high-risk, high-reward research that will allow us to maintain our economic dominance in this space.

But I think we must do more on energy innovation, so I have offered an amendment to increase the authorization for ARPA-E above and beyond what is in this bill. Specifically, the amendment sets forth authorization levels as follows: $325 million for fiscal years 2016 to 2018 and $375 million per year for fiscal years 2019 through 2020.

This is a relatively modest increase of just $113 million over 4 years. It is important to remember that ARPA-E was the brainchild of a National Academies report which recommended to Congress that they establish an ARPA-E within the U.S. Department of Energy, modeled after a very successful program in the Department of Defense called DARPA. The agency was credited with such innovations as GPS, the stealth fighter, and computer networking.

In 2007, Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the America COMPETES Act, which officially authorized the creation ARPA-E. In 2009, Congress appropriated and President Obama allocated $400 million to the new agency, which funded ARPA-E's first projects.

In the years since, despite bipartisan support, ARPA-E has not received more than the $280 million in funding. Yet this agency has had incredible success with even this modest amount of funding. For example, ARPA-E awardees have developed a 1-megawatt silicon carbide transistor the size of a fingernail and engineered microbes that use hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make liquid transportation fuel. They invest in pioneering research that is groundbreaking, transformative, and amazing. Think about what they could do with just a little more money.

Innovation in advanced energy technologies can be a significant part of the solution to any number of challenges: increasing the reliability of our grid, lowering our electricity rates, hardening our energy infrastructure against cyber attacks, and many others. ARPA-E is helping to fund projects at the cutting edge of all of these challenges--and more.

I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to continue to support ARPA-E and to vote for this amendment and to support the underlying bill, which is an important step to paving the way to a revolution in the way in which we produce and consume energy in the United States.
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