Issue Position: Energy

Issue Position

Alternative energy is the next frontier of job growth. Investing in renewable energy production and a smarter energy grid means investing in great jobs for Georgians, and as your Congressman, will use my knowledge and leadership in this area to create a climate for more of these careers in our great state.

Top goals:

*Take leadership on the convergence of renewable electricity, energy efficiency and smart grid technology as, together, representing a state change in our national energy infrastructure

*Remove roadblocks due to entrenched business models and market rules that are not designed to reward efficiency, integration, or new entrants into the generation market

*Enable consumers and business to control their own consumption decisions with smart meters, smart appliances, demand management programs, better energy mix

*Creation of Strategic Natural Resource Plans that can be implemented locally

*Support the enormous job creation, energy security and resource management capability that comes with our energy decisions

Just turning on the lights and heating/cooling our homes has become a major burden for many homes. Electricity bills in the U.S. have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row. And putting gas in the car has become a major financial ordeal for millions of hard working Americans. The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States has increased by more than 100% in the past few years while oil and gas company production and profits are at an all-time high.

Our energy decisions are all about job creation. Every kind of American can and should adopt an American clean energy agenda. The energy economy crosses all parties, religions and economic classes.

Homeowners and commercial property owners - hundreds of thousands of Americans could be employed in energy-efficiency jobs, retrofitting buildings to waste less energy and water. Such workers put in clean, nontoxic insulation; replace old boilers and furnaces; install better windows and doors, cutting home energy bills by 30 percent or more. Financed the right way, building owners can pay for those services out of the savings from energy bills. Properly structured and financed, the same dollar bill would cut unemployment, energy bills, pollution, and asthma -- in programs that pay for themselves.

Helps our struggling rural communities and farmers earn additional paychecks, build energy independence. For companies, we're missing out on an ability to manufacture American products for the world market, to build/create sensors/controls/transmission infrastructure, create software for this growing industry. Puts unemployed, underemployed and entrepreneurial people to work -- also creating a unique opportunity for our young people and their future. We need to redirect fossil fuel subsidies toward these employment programs and get banks to (who we taxpayers rescued) to help homeowners, businesses and local governments with these new investments. After all, people are our most valuable resource.

Sustainability planning has now become a necessity by every business and organization. The ability to collect and comprehend energy decisions is a top priority. All companies will become energy companies in a smart grid world.

Renewable energy is here, it is ready, and it can provide a very large share of the energy we need to run an advanced, prosperous and growing economy. The remaining question is whether we are ready to take the leadership to seize this opportunity. Consumers and businesses become active choosers and can influence the kind of generation plants we build -- or if we build them at all -- simply by the way they use electricity.

We need to transform our thinking about modernizing our power grid -- on everything from system planning and flexibility, to new business models and market rules. America needs to take the same approach it took with every other strategic infrastructure upgrade that unlocked economic growth in our past. From building railroads and highways to communications to rural electrification, we focused our policies on capturing the scope and potential payoff of a major national project. That included providing the incentives to businesses and consumers through smart policy to lift all segments and increase economic productivity.

As example, the military considers electricity a critical vulnerability and has mandated a 25% renewable participation to its forces by 2025 (25 x 25). Every $1 increase in a barrel of oil represents $130M in fuel costs for the Department of Defense. A few States have enacted the same sort of initiatives to help their citizens and businesses control and save on their energy costs. And what is considered mission critical to the DoD should be to all Americans. Major planning and movement to a renewable mix is happening everywhere in the U.S. except primarily in the Southeast, mostly due to our outdated regulations.

Also, The Dept of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab has concluded a new study showing the U.S. could adequately supply 80% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while balancing supply and demand at the hourly level. And it could do this using existing commercial technology.

The report offers a great blueprint for thinking about our energy future. It once again shows that a renewables-dominant energy system is not a technical challenge, but an engineering and creativity challenge. This is what Americans do best -- we can take a challenge, find creative solutions, deploy it nationally, then market it to the world. (Read about the NREL report here: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-4.pdf)

Both air and water should be considered strategic resources for Americans. Clean and abundant water is essential to growing crops, managing livestock, and attracting homeowners and businesses to our area. Power plants are, by far, our largest water users and we've all lived the results of small bouts of drought here in Georgia. However, Air and Water Regulations to protect children, seniors, the infirm, and all citizens from air pollution are under intense lobby attack from the coal industry and many utilities. This includes Georgia companies who are members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity like Southern Co and Norfolk Southern and organizations like the Georgia Association of Manufacturers. These toxins know nothing about state boundaries and are citizen-agnostic. Today more than 130 coal companies, electric utilities, trade associations, other polluting industries, and states are suing the EPA in federal court to obliterate, undermine, or delay essential health protection standards in the name of corporate profit. Being from West Virginia, a State virtually owned by coal and chemical concerns, I can report this type of lobbying is killing jobs and citizens. Our poor air quality (#1 in asthma) in Georgia is directly related to our reliance on transporting, storing and burning coal to obtain our energy. This, in turn, earns us the honor of having to purchase special gasoline here in Georgia from a single refinery and pipeline that's historically interrupted by Gulf of Mexico storms and hurricanes. Our "cheap" energy source and rates are not fully burdened costs and will soon rise beyond our control.

We should not continue to heavily subsidize a dirty fuel like coal that burdens Americans with environmental and health costs, while at the same time benefiting large, wealthy corporations. On public lands, especially, the public should not foot the bill for the consequences of coal mining, and especially if coal companies plan to enrich themselves even further by exporting these American resources overseas. Also, we will not frack or drill our way to energy independence or improved economics and we should closely monitor the safety and health repercussions of any energy production that involves taxpayer dollars and irreplaceable resources. www.burningthefuture.org, www.ilovemountains.org to see where your energy comes from,

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