Energy Costs

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for his leadership and his clarity, and I want to underscore one of the most basic points that has to be made. And this is how times have changed.

We have changed what we are talking about because energy systems change, prices change, needs change, and the load changes. Right? But hearing the Senator from Kansas, it could have been 1998 or 2008 or 2018. It is the same talking points, and it is literally not true anymore.

There was a time when you could actually credibly say: Look, I understand there is a planetary emergency. But coal is so cheap. People are struggling. We have to balance the planetary emergency with the need for people to be able to cool and heat their homes and keep their lights on and all the rest of it.

All of that is out the window. Why? Because clean is cheap and cheap is clean. Clean energy is now the cheapest kind of electricity that we can get on the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe.

There was a time where it was coal. That is definitely more expensive now. There was a time where it was gas, but the cost of gas keeps going up and up and up, for a couple of reasons--because we are exporting a lot of our gas but also because the turbines needed to convert natural gas into electrons--there is a huge backlog of them.

So we have an industrial renaissance happening in certain States, and we have all of this AI data center load coming up, and we have your normal American economy stuff happening. There are not enough electrons on the grid.

What happens when there is not enough of something? The people selling that thing raise the price. And that is exactly what is happening.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. Like, they have overnight prices. They have people whose job it is to find how we are going to meet everybody's needs, so when you flick that switch, everything just works. There are technicians in front of probably three or four screens figuring out ``OK. I am going to buy this. This is the overnight price. This is the backup,'' all that.

What has changed over the last couple of years is that solar energy is it. Even if you don't care at all about the climate, you should still love solar energy. Why? Because nobody should be enthused about paying more for electricity.

What Donald Trump has done is very unique in American history, maybe even in world history--I am not too sure. It is normal for a President of the United States to try to alleviate economic pain for the citizens of the United States, and this is certainly the first President that I have experienced in the U.S. Senate but honestly the first President that I have even been aware of who is intentionally raising the price of something that we all need.

It is Secretary Burgum's order, and it is the way Secretary Wright is behaving, and it is the way Lee Zeldin is behaving, and it is the way people in the White House are behaving. They want to create a shortage of electricity. Why? First, they have ideology against solar and wind. Trump has a particular idea about wind and golf courses and birds or whatever. But they viewed, 10 years ago, solar as a kind of ideological project, as like a nice to have, United Nations, utopian view of the world.

Well, listen, solar is the most pragmatic thing we can put on the grid. Solar is really the only thing that is ready quickly. Why? Because nuclear energy has tremendous potential but is at least an 8- to 12-year timeframe, so we are talking about the 2030s. Geothermal also has tremendous potential, but they have not worked out all of the technical issues. And again, that is really a 2030 to 2040 play.

In the short run, we have a shortage. In the short run, we have a shortage, and Donald Trump is making it worse. Now, why would you make it worse? Well, when there are shortages of something, the people selling the thing get to charge more, and they are charging more.

So you, as the consumer--and again, I care deeply about this planetary crisis. It is actually the main reason I am in the U.S. Senate. I care deeply about this. But even if you don't, nobody wants to pay more than necessary on their electricity bills, and this national solar ban is making everybody pay more.

One in four Americans struggles to pay their electricity bills--one in four Americans. So what is Trump doing about it? Well, it is definitely worse than nothing.

The criticism about Biden during the inflation crisis was that he wasn't doing enough about inflation, but this is a different criticism. This is deliberate policy choices to drive up the cost of something that everybody needs.

By the way, that is also true for food and health insurance and electricity. All the stuff you need, he is creating a shortage of. Why? Because when there are shortages, people have to petition the King for mercy, and that is what is going on right now.

If you are close to him, if you can get dinner with him at Mar-a- Lago, you can get relief. There is enough money in the system for lots of people to get wealthy, but there is not enough money for a regular person living in Kaimuki, Honolulu, already paying three or four times the average electricity rate, paying more and more and more because there is a national policy driven by the President of the United States to create a shortage of electrons because he has decided that climate action is against his interests.

I think, if we are going to move forward on permitting reform but if we are going to move forward more generally on the question of affordability, we have to say that shortages are bad for prices. When there is not enough of something, people charge too much, and right now, we need as many electrons on the grid as we can possibly get, which means we need interstate transmission, and we need to not just permit new projects but at a minimum let the projects that have been almost totally built be plugged into the grid.

So this is not a climate speech; this is a ``people can't afford their electricity bills'' speech. And I just hope some of my Republican colleagues understand they have to abandon their old talking points because they don't apply anymore.

Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap.

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Mr. SCHATZ. Yes. I would be pleased to yield for a question through the Chair.

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Mr. SCHATZ. Well, our grid is different, obviously, because we have a series of islands, and they are kind of self-contained grids. But our challenge is, to meet the load, we need electrons. And we do the dirtiest and most expensive thing, which is to light low-sulfur fuel oil on fire to create electrons. That is just north of like, you know, wood-burning stoves in terms of its efficiency. It is not a good way to do it economically, and it is not a good way to do it in terms of climate impact.

So the Hawaiian Electric Company has a bunch of clean-energy projects on the grid because we have--the net capacity factors for our wind project on land are comparable to offshore wind. That is how much the wind blows in parts of essentially Maui and Hawaii Island. The southern part of Hawaii Island is incredible. People don't believe the numbers until they go down there and measure them. It is as if it is an offshore wind platform, but it is land-based. So we have ample resources to power our grid.

When I was a kid in the Hawaii Legislature, I still remember the Hawaiian Electric Company would come and testify and say: The maximum penetration of renewables onto the grid is 15 percent. After that, you get power quality problems.

By the way, that was true when that person studied electrical engineering in the seventies. That was actually true. The person wasn't lying. It is just that we have figured out a lot of this. It is not that we don't continue to need dispatchable power or baseload power; it is that grids are getting really, really smart and capable of handling high penetration of intermittent renewable energy. And when you layer them on top of each other, they are no longer functionally intermittent.

So I kind of was like--I am sort of like from the future, right, because 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was cheaper for us to move in the direction of clean energy in Hawaii, but you couldn't say that on the continental United States side. And we moved in that direction as fast as we possibly could and tried to provide some measure of relief for ratepayers.

But now what is going to happen is we are going to have to buy a bunch of electrons in the most expensive fashion. We are the most isolated majorly populated place on the planet, and everybody pays more for everything, and now electricity bills are going to go up because of the OBBA.
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