Hearing Of The Subcommittee On Water And Power Of The House Committee On Natural Resources - "The President's Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request For The Power Marketing Administrations, United States Department Of Energy"

Statement

I am very pleased to call this hearing today on the President's Fiscal
Year 2011 Budget Request for the federal Power Marketing
Administrations. It's good see that all four of the PMA Administrators
could make the trip to Washington today to update the Congress on the most
important issues each of your agencies face. Welcome.
In these days of drought, flood, and extreme climate conditions, much
of the focus of this Subcommittee has been on conflicts over the use of
water. In my home state of California, we have spent every waking hour
thinking about the best ways to balance the needs of economy and the
environment. Within this Subcommittee, we also know how critical water is
to the generation of clean, inexpensive hydropower that is the foundation of
many rural economies in the Western and Southern United States.
Each of our four PMAs is unique in terms of geographic location,
customer base, the amount of infrastructure it owns, and the authority each
has. PMA Administrators' testimonies today help shed light on those
differences, yet also serve to remind us that some of the challenges our
PMAs face are universal.
Water shortages caused by climate change are redefining the way we
generate our power and are reducing the amount of hydropower available to
customers. Also, aging infrastructure is increasingly causing a reduction in
hydropower generation across the country, which points to the need to
rehabilitate our generation resources if we are to maintain historic power
production levels. We face increasing demand for cheap sources of clean
energy and the transmission to deliver it to urban load centers as our
population grows. We must also continue to develop green energy
resources, yet constraints in our infrastructure limit our ability to do so.
These challenges cause us to look to the future and understand that we
will have to do more with less. We need hydropower because it is the
cleanest, cheapest energy we have. At the same time, more competition for
increasingly scarce water makes our hydropower system more fragile over
time. Innovative strategies to manage our hydropower resources are needed
and those strategies must be implemented using effective leadership, strong
vision, and the proper amount of funding. Today, I hope to hear from each
PMA Administrator how his respective agency plans to confront tomorrow's
challenges using the funding outlined in its budget request.

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