Issue Position: Free Market Energy Policy

Issue Position

The United States can and must once again be the world's energy powerhouse. We must unleash American free-market ingenuity to produce and develop new energy technology to power the next phase of American prosperity. Doing so, we will stabilize and reduce energy costs, reduce our balance of trade deficit, reduce pollution and poverty worldwide, and end free-world reliance on petroleum imported from OPEC and hostile nations.
Kelly Ayotte supports President Obama's EPA global warming regulations. I oppose them. Like Obamacare, these regulations are aggressively partisan and have almost no Republican support. These regulations are tied up in litigation and, if they survive Supreme Court challenge, will force states to adopt hyper-complex compliance plans subject to special interest gaming and to hire lobbyists and bureaucrats to plead for waivers from Washington. For those like me who accept the published science, even the EPA admits* that this regulation will do nothing to reduce power plant carbon emissions beyond what the market is already doing.
Here's what I support:
End Energy Subsidies. Phase out all direct subsidies, tax preferences, and supply and production mandates for coal, oil, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, biomass, ethanol fuels, etc. Unsubsidized energy efficiency and utility-scale wind and solar PV are already competitive with combined cycle natural gas as electricity sources. Crony capitalism (politicians instead of markets picking winners and losers) corrupts government and distorts and freezes marketplace dynamics which otherwise drive out cost and accelerate knowledge and technology commercialization. Markets -- not government bureaucrats or energy lobbyists -- must be left free to determine which energy sources meet the varying and changing needs of energy consumers. This free-market approach removes power from Washington and reduces energy market distortions that slow technology innovation and lead to poorly located windfarms and uneconomic nuclear plant construction.
A Manhattan Project for Lower-Cost Energy. Over the centuries, innovation and increasingly abundant and clean energy have consistently powered improvement in human prosperity and well-being. Let's not stop now. Over the past decade, the federal government has spent about $2 billion per on basic energy research, too little to ensure continued American energy technology leadership. Let's add $10 billion per year in sustained national support for pre-commercial energy R&D. We already know that this will work. The US leads the world in medical technology and biomedicine, enjoying the resulting high-paying domestic jobs and strong net exports. We've achieved this as a direct result of $30 billion annual funding for pre-commercial health science research, sustained over the past decade and largely distributed via competitive grants by the National Institutes of Health. Despite this success and strong political support for protecting our science and technology lead, the US has fallen to #11 in global R&D per capita. Taxpayer-backed energy R&D should focus -- not on corporate cronyism like more Solyndras -- but on high-risk, blue-sky work in materials science, more efficient photovoltaics (i.e., nanocrystals and charge hopping), quantum physics, energy storage and batteries, offshore wind, and modular thorium reactors, for example.
* Verbatim from the EPA Clean Power Plan Final Rule: Required reductions are "…fully consistent with the recent changes and current trends in electricity generation, and as a result, would by no means entail fundamental redirection of the energy sector … We expect that the main impact of this rule on the nation's mix of generation will be to reduce coal-fired generation, but in an amount and by a rate that is consistent with recent historical declines in coal-fired generation. Specifically, from approximately 2005 to 2014, coal-fired generation declined at a rate that was greater than the rate of reduced coal-fired generation that we expect to result from this rulemaking from 2015 to 2030. In addition, under this rule, the trends for all other types of generation, including natural gas-fired generation, nuclear generation, and renewable generation, will remain generally consistent with what their trends would be in the absence of this rule."

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