Guaranteeing Reliability Through the Interconnection of Dispatchable Power Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. CASTOR of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the ranking member for yielding the time.

I rise in opposition to H.R. 1047. It is a bill that will give polluting gas plants an unfair and costly shortcut to the electric grid while doing nothing to protect working families from rising energy costs.

This is an unfortunate theme this Congress. Despite the promises of the President and my Republican colleagues in Congress, they haven't brought any bill that will help address the affordability squeeze. Right now, as we debate this package of energy bills, there is a big discussion going on about the Republican budget that is coming to the floor likely tomorrow, and Democrats are here to say we are going to fight to protect Americans' pocketbooks. We want lower costs.

We know the impact of the big, ugly bill was to raise healthcare costs and to raise energy bills. It is really time that the average working American get a break for a change. We want to cancel the cuts of the ACA. The Affordable Care Act tax credits are a pathway to affordability and lifesaving care, and it appears that the Republicans are going to refuse to reinstate those tax credits. We want to fight to lower costs, to protect Medicaid, to save healthcare. This is the larger context of this debate on energy bills, as well.

This bill is a good example. You can peer into Congress and say, okay, who is fighting for me. This GRID Power Act is unnecessary. What has been happening is that cleaner, cheaper sources of energy are waiting to come onto the grid, and the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress now are throwing up as many barriers as possible because they are on the side of the polluters.

You can see, we had a coal bill. This is a gas bill. What about the cleaner, cheaper energy that is waiting right now to come onto the queue? They are throwing barriers up to getting those cost savings to hardworking families. This does nothing to ensure a reliable grid, which is so vitally important at a time of more extreme events.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has the power already to approve changes to the interconnection queue process. That is a funny term for how we bring sources of energy onto the grid, this disjointed grid across the country. FERC can prioritize what power sources come onto the grid when it deems necessary. You don't need to give an unfair costly shortcut to gas plants.

These kind of decisions on how we are going to power our lives and connect resources to the grid, these are very complex decisions, and you want robust analysis. You want an independent FERC fully staffed with experts to make these decisions in partnership with local grid operators, clearly, because FERC already has the authority to do a lot of this as long as it is supported by evidence.

This Republican bill says: Forget the evidence. We are just going to give this fast-pass to gas companies. It allows them to cut in line, and that is unfair. What they should be doing is speeding the cleaner, cheaper resources to the grid, giving them a fair shot to do it.

We had a committee meeting in the Energy Subcommittee this week, and we had the acting general counsel from the Department of Energy appear before us. Just to show you the fast-pass that polluters and gas companies are getting, we asked him about the Energy Secretary's trip overseas to try to sell more natural gas from Americans. I asked him: Well, have you done any analysis on this to show that that is not going to raise costs on American ratepayers and consumers?

He said: No, not that I know of.

If you keep pushing exports of our energy resources, what happens to the costs for hardworking families here, and what happens to domestic businesses as those resources go elsewhere, as well?

One of FERC's responsibilities is to keep prices affordable. That is made possible by competition. You want this resource to be as resource neutral as much as possible. If you don't believe in neutrality, what you are going to do? You are going to stifle American innovation and entrepreneurship.

When you talk about reliability, it isn't a description of an individual generator, but rather it is an attribute that applies to the entire grid across the country. It is not a given that additional dispatchable resources aid reliability themselves. You have to rely on a mix of generation, different fuels, and wires to make sure everyone can get the power they need all the time.

When you put your finger on the scale of a certain power source and then put barriers to others, especially cleaner, cheaper sources, that is just a recipe for higher costs for businesses and consumers alike.

When this bill came before our committee, I had an answer to a lot of this dysfunction about how we expedite resources to the grid. My amendment said that for any projects that are prioritized in the interconnection queue by this bill, if you are going to expedite them, then we want to see proof that they are coming online within 4 years.

My Republican colleagues didn't want to shine the light on the gas plants that can't come online in 4 years, and they all voted down my amendment.

If they are genuinely concerned about meeting demand growth in the next 4 years and genuinely believe that gas is going to do that, they could have agreed to this amendment, but everyone voted it down.

Here is the dirty little secret that everyone in the energy industry knows right now, but Republicans are glossing over: There is a critical shortage of gas turbines. That means the cost of gas plants is already facing inflationary pressures. Those inflationary pressures, who are they passed on to? They are passed on to consumers back home, to hardworking American families. If you haven't ordered your gas turbine now, you are not getting it this decade.

The only way we are going to meet growing electricity demand in the next few years is through cleaner, cheaper power that is waiting to come onto the grid--wind, batteries, distributed energy sources, demand response, grid-enhancing technologies, and other solutions.

This is an incoherent energy policy from the Trump administration. You say you want more power. We need more power. We have AI data centers, but let's kill the offshore wind projects. Let's create barriers to getting sources of energy onto the grid that are ready to come onto the grid, and let's make life more expensive for hardworking people because we are going to say, no, only gas plants get that fast pass, but we don't have the turbines and the infrastructure to get them on the grid.

That is incoherent. That means that it is going to be costly, and that is the last thing that our neighbors need back home. They want people working together on solutions.

Ripping healthcare away, making healthcare coverage more expensive, and making electric bills more expensive, all of these policies are unpopular. I wish we could get back to working together on real solutions for the American people. I believe they need relief from the cost of living, and we should be working together to get there.

Mr. Speaker, let's reject this bill and get back to working on those solutions together.

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