OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Solar Energy

Floor Speech

Date: Feb. 3, 2016
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Energy

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Mr. REID. Will the Senator yield for a question?

It is also true, is it not, as we speak, that there is tremendous work being done on battery storage. That will change it even more; is that right?

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Mr. REID. Will the Senator yield for a question?

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Mr. REID. I am wondering if my friend is aware of a couple of examples. In Nevada there is Tesla and Elon Musk. It is a massive company. He is building batteries for his vehicles and other things.

The Tesla plant I toured a few months ago is under construction. As to the floor plan, the only place in America with a bigger manufacturing facility is the Boeing plant in Washington. That is how huge it is. The man who is running that plant for him indicated to me that they had found that the price, as indicated by the Senator from Maine, was so cheap with solar that it is going to be basically mostly solar, nothing else. Was the Senator aware of that?

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Mr. REID. And remember what he is manufacturing in this huge facility is batteries. So I would think Elon Musk, who has been sending people and cargo into space, is going to come up with an idea to make better batteries.

I would also suggest to my friend that the example of Packard and Kodak were very good examples. But more modern, I read a book a few months ago about Reed Hastings, the owner of Netflix, who had already been successful in another line of work when he went into Netflix. We all remember Blockbuster, where we would go to rent our movies. He went to Blockbuster and he said: I have an idea; here is what I would like to do.

They said: No, that is just a niche business. We are not interested.

Blockbuster is gone, and Netflix is every place. So the same thing is going to happen one way or another to these monopolies that have the power in our States. They should work something out to make sure they are ahead of the curve. Otherwise, they are going to be behind the curve--and fairly quickly.

Would the Senator agree with that?

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