Energy Independence

Floor Speech

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Mr. OLSON. I thank my colleague from the Buckeye State. Ohio has always been a coal State. Now, with the Utica Shale plate, it's an oil and gas State.

Mr. Speaker, the HEAT Team is back for the 113th Congress. I'm proud to be joining the HEAT Team--the House Energy Action Team--as we talk about a dream: American energy independence. As part of that goal, I'll be talking this afternoon about power generation and grid reliability.

In Texas, bigger is always better. Texas got bigger than any State in the last 10 years. We did it for simple reasons: no state income tax; a right to work State; commonsense regulations; and cheap, reliable energy. To sustain that growth, we need five new large power plants in the next 2 to 3 years. It could be a matter of life and death. If we have a power crisis such as the heat wave like we had in August of 2011, when the entire State was over 100 degrees for all 31 days of that month, if that happens again, in the next 1 or 2 years, power may go out over the State, with rolling brownouts, rolling blackouts. That could be life and death for the elderly, the young, the poor.

The Obama administration's obstacles to fossil fuels is our greatest challenge. Radical environmentalists have killed two new, large power plants. One is the Las Brisas power plant near Corpus Christi, and the second is the White Stallion Power Plant, a coal plant, near Bay City, where we have two nuclear reactors. Las Brisas was like coal. It used petroleum coke to refine that to make it energy. Now we'll export that energy source overseas.

We need options to make sure that mothballed power plants can come back on line if we need them in a crisis. But as we've seen in the past, these power plants run the risk of being sued for exceeding their environmental limitations from the EPA. I have reintroduced a bill, H.R. 271, in this Congress. It passed in the last Congress unanimously in the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which I'm a member. It passed unanimously on this floor last Congress. It's coming back in committee sometime in the next couple of weeks.

By passing this bill, we send a simple message: if the person or entity that runs the power grid tells you to keep that power plant up and running, and you exceed the EPA limitations, you cannot be held liable for exceeding the limitations when some government agency has told you to keep the power plant up and running. That's common sense.

I thank my colleague. I'm glad to be here because we have a chance again to make our country energy independent.

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