Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. She will be picking up at the end of my remarks.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, it is a real pleasure to be joined here today on the Senate floor by Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. Senator Shaheen has been a tireless advocate for clean energy and is the Senate's bipartisan champion on energy efficiency, alongside Senator Portman.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a major warning last week. Ninety-one authors and editors from 40 countries reviewed more than 6,000 scientific papers to assess what it would take to hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The report says that we will need to invest roughly five times what we do now in low- carbon energy and energy efficiency by 2050. The Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency legislation would help move us toward that target.

The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy says that the bill would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 650 million metric tons over a 15-year period. The cumulative net savings from the bill would reach nearly $100 billion.

My State of Rhode Island is a national leader in promoting energy efficiency, so we know how good programs like the Shaheen-Portman reforms are for consumers, for businesses, and for the environment. Rhode Island has consistently ranked among the top States for energy efficiency. This year, we are in the top three on the State Energy Efficiency Scorecard.

To keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the IPCC tells us we need renewables to grow to about half of the world's energy mix by 2030 and to perhaps 80 percent of the world's energy mix by midcentury. Coal in the global electricity mix needs to be mostly phased out by 2050.

The fossil fuel industry's front groups, of which there is a considerable legion, tell us that this will raise costs on consumers, but renewables are now beating fossil fuel power on cost, and renewable costs are still falling.

In a recent report on global energy trends, Deloitte notes:

Solar and wind power recently crossed a new threshold. . . . Already among the cheapest energy sources globally, solar and wind have much further to go.

The Deloitte report shows the top solar States here in yellow, the top wind States here in blue, and these two--Texas and California--are in green because they are leaders in both wind and solar.

If you look at the top 20 U.S. solar and wind States, three-quarters of those States have electricity prices below the national average, so clearly renewables don't hurt energy costs. By the way, these States include some of the reddest politically, including Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Iowa, and Texas.

The cost transition with renewables coming down through the price of fossil fuel is showing up in U.S. solar projects' purchased-power agreements. You can see in this chart from Greentech Media that over time, solar generation costs have come down in line with new-built natural gas generation. That is what this band is. This is the price for new-built natural gas generation.

This dot here represents a new project by NextEra Energy to sell power to the southern Arizona utility, Tucson Electric Power, from a 100-megawatt solar array with an accompanying 30-megawatt energy storage system for $45 per megawatt hour, right in line with new natural gas plants. One industry analyst suggested that this facility effectively took the place of a peak-demand gas plant.

Defenders of old, dirty energy sources paint renewables as unreliable, as intermittent, but Deloitte's report finds that renewables have actually proven ``to strengthen grid resilience and reliability.'' Integrating renewable capacity into the grid has gone well in practice, and FERC analyses predict increased renewable uses to improve grid security and resiliency.

The grid operator in Iowa, the most heavily wind-powered State, figured out a while ago the algorithms to treat wind across its grid as baseload. When you pair wind or solar projects with battery storage, like that NextEra project, then individual renewable projects become baseload power sources. You don't have to aggregate and run algorithms; that is a new baseload source.

The transition involves batteries, and batteries are booming. Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables projects worldwide storage capacity currently around 6 gigawatt hours to grow tenfold, to at least 65 gigawatt hours by 2022; 2022 is right around the corner--a tenfold growth.

Costs are falling fast. Lithium-ion batteries are down in price 80 percent since 2010, just in these 7 years. That is an 80-percent drop in price.

Regulators are adapting. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just finalized a new rule--a unanimous and bipartisan new rule--for energy storage on America's electric grids.

One study has predicted the rule could spur 50 gigawatts of additional energy storage across the United States, enough to power roughly 35 million homes.

Energy storage is actually coming to market already. The Colorado State Public Utility Commission just unanimously approved an Xcel Energy Program to build $2.5 billion in renewable energy and battery storage, to retire 660 megawatts of coal-fired power, shutting down ongoing plants for cheaper, new renewable battery combinations. The request for bids didn't just smoke out this one bid; it brought out a flood of renewable energy proposals at costs that beat out existing coal and natural gas facilities.

The IPCC warning was particularly serious and specific about the urgent choices before us, and we, too, need to be serious about a new direction to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Renewable energy and energy efficiency are our pathways in that direction, along with a new technology--trapping carbon emissions to use or store them, even pulling carbon dioxide straight from the air.

These carbon-captured technologies have been starved without revenue because of a failure in energy market economics, which is that there is no revenue proposition for capturing carbon pollution. Which brings me to the Nobel Prize in economics just won by William D. Nordhaus of Yale University.

Nordhaus aligns with the well-established market economics that polluters should pay for damage to the environment and to public health. That is econ 101. Without that, the price signal, which is at the heart of market economics, is off, and subsidies result. The market fails. And when the International Monetary Fund estimates the fossil fuel subsidy at $700 billion per year just in the United States, that is a massive market failure.

Nordhaus recommends that we correct the enormous market failure which the fossil fuel industry now so busily protects politically. ``There is basically no alternative to a market solution,'' Nordhaus said in response to the Nobel Prize award. ``The incentives,'' he said, ``are market prices--to raise the price of goods and services that are carbon intensive and lower the ones that are less carbon intensive.''

The science on this, as I think most of us understand, is firmly established, and the economics are widely understood. It is the politics that keep getting in the way--the fossil fuel industry dark money politics.

``This is the last frontier of climate change,'' said Nordhaus. ``I think we understand the science,'' he said. ``I think we understand the economics of abatement,'' he said. He said: ``We understand pretty much the damages. But we don't understand how to bring countries together. That is where the real frontier work is going on today.''

America should be leading at this frontier, not lagging. Lost in our fossil fuel politics, we are failing in leadership. History will not be kind with our failure.

It is well past time for Congress to wake up.
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