[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                          LESSONS LEARNED FROM
                  THE TEXAS BLACKOUTS: RESEARCH NEEDS
                    FOR A SECURE AND RESILIENT GRID

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                      COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE,
                             AND TECHNOLOGY
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                             MARCH 18, 2021

                               __________

                            Serial No. 117-5

                               __________

 Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
 
 [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


       Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
       
                               __________

                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
43-633PDF                 WASHINGTON : 2021                     
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------       
       

              COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY

             HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
ZOE LOFGREN, California              FRANK LUCAS, Oklahoma, 
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon                 Ranking Member
AMI BERA, California                 MO BROOKS, Alabama
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan,             BILL POSEY, Florida
    Vice Chair                       RANDY WEBER, Texas
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey           BRIAN BABIN, Texas
JAMAAL BOWMAN, New York              ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
BRAD SHERMAN, California             MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado              JAMES R. BAIRD, Indiana
JERRY McNERNEY, California           PETE SESSIONS, Texas
PAUL TONKO, New York                 DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida
BILL FOSTER, Illinois                MIKE GARCIA, California
DONALD NORCROSS, New Jersey          STEPHANIE I. BICE, Oklahoma
DON BEYER, Virginia                  YOUNG KIM, California
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida               RANDY FEENSTRA, Iowa
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois                JAKE LaTURNER, Kansas
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania             CARLOS A. GIMENEZ, Florida
DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina         JAY OBERNOLTE, California
GWEN MOORE, Wisconsin                PETER MEIJER, Michigan
DAN KILDEE, Michigan                 VACANCY
SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania
LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas
VACANCY
                         C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                             March 18, 2021

                                                                   Page

Hearing Charter..................................................     2

                           Opening Statements

Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman, 
  Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of 
  Representatives................................................     7
    Written Statement............................................     8

Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member, 
  Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of 
  Representatives................................................     9
    Written Statement............................................    10

                               Witnesses:

Dr. Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and 
  Aerospace Engineering, Andlinger Center for Energy and the 
  Environment at Princeton University
    Oral Statement...............................................    12
    Written Statement............................................    15

Dr. Varun Rai, Associate Dean for Research; Professor of Public 
  Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of 
  Texas at Austin
    Oral Statement...............................................    32
    Written Statement............................................    34

Mr. Juan Torres, Associate Laboratory Director, Energy Systems 
  Integration National Renewable Energy Laboratory
    Oral Statement...............................................    40
    Written Statement............................................    42

Ms. Beth Garza, Senior Fellow, R Street Institute
    Oral Statement...............................................    56
    Written Statement............................................    58

Dr. Sue Tierney, Senior Advisor, Analysis Group
    Oral Statement...............................................    69
    Written Statement............................................    71

Discussion.......................................................    91

             Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions

Dr. Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and 
  Aerospace Engineering, Andlinger Center for Energy and the 
  Environment at Princeton University............................   132

Dr. Sue Tierney, Senior Advisor, Analysis Group..................   136

            Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record

Executive summary of a report submitted by Representative Sean 
  Casten, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House 
  of Representatives.............................................   140

Documents submitted by Representative Bill Posey, Committee on 
  Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives..   145

Article submitted by Representative Bill Posey, Committee on 
  Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives..   157

Report submitted by Representative Brian Babin, Committee on 
  Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives..   161

 
                     LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE TEXAS
                       BLACKOUTS: RESEARCH NEEDS
                    FOR A SECURE AND RESILIENT GRID

                              ----------                              


                        THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021

                          House of Representatives,
               Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
                                                   Washington, D.C.

     The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 o'clock a.m., 
via Webex, Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson [Chairwoman of the 
Committee] presiding.
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

     Chairwoman Johnson. And without objection, the Chair is 
authorized to declare recess at any time.
     Before I deliver my opening remarks, I want to note that 
Committee is meeting virtually, and I want to announce a couple 
of reminders to the Members about the conduct of the hearing. 
First, Members should keep their video feed on as long as they 
are present in the meeting. Members are responsible for their 
own microphones. Please also keep your microphones muted unless 
you are speaking. And finally, if Members have documents they 
wish to submit for the record, please email them to the 
Committee Clerk, whose email address was circulated prior to 
the meeting. These are our standard instructions, and I know 
we'll all cooperate.
     Just a month ago on Valentine's Day, Winter Storm Uri 
descended upon Texas and broke cold temperature records across 
the State. Forty-eight percent of the electricity generation 
capacity for the State grid went offline due to frozen 
components and frozen fuel supplies. By February the 16th, four 
million Texas households were without power. Millions of Texans 
had no heat and no electricity for three days or more with 
temperatures well below freezing. At least 70 people died as a 
result of Winter Storm Uri and these power outages. One of them 
was just 11 years old. Cristian Pineda died of hypothermia 
after electricity was cutoff in his family's mobile home in 
Conroe, Texas. He had been trying to stay warm under a pile of 
blankets with his three-year-old brother. An eight-year-old 
girl and her mother died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Harris 
County after they ran the family car to try to stay warm.
     The electricity and heating crisis led to a severe water 
crisis. Water pipes burst, flooding homes. By Friday the 19th, 
12 million Texans were under a boil water advisory because the 
water supplies had fallen too low. And all of this happened in 
the midst of the greatest public health crisis this country has 
seen in a century, when families are dealing with lost loved 
ones, lost jobs, illness, and isolation.
     I'm lucky enough to have lost power for just 1 day, and I 
kept warm overnight just by piling on blankets.
     Texans, Texans deserve better. There was a lot of 
discussion in the immediate aftermath of the Texas blackouts 
about who to blame. There was a lot of misinformation and 
political jockeying. What seems clear already is that Electric 
Reliability Council of Texas, better known as ERCOT, failed to 
prepare its energy infrastructure for extreme weather 
conditions. It is unacceptable that millions of Texans were 
left without power for days on end during one of the worst 
winter storms in our State's history.
     But I know there is more for us to examine about what 
happened in Texas, and it is our responsibility as policymakers 
to get answers. Why didn't the models used by the utilities see 
this coming? Which systems and components performed well and 
which failed? Could better demand response technologies have 
allowed the Texas grid operators to ease the burden of these 
charges and outages? What was the role of climate change in 
enabling the conditions for this extreme weather episode? How 
ready is the electricity sector for future extreme weather 
events like wildfires and heat waves? That's what I had thought 
we'd be looking forward to but not this type of winter. Will 
Texas be brought to its knees if our grid is attacked by a 
sophisticated adversary?
     If we can get a clear-eyed understanding of how these 
failures occurred, we can help prevent them from happening in 
the future. What Texans endured last month must not be in vain. 
We must learn from this episode and redouble our research 
efforts in support of a more reliable, resilient electricity 
sector.
     Last Congress, our fellow Committee Member, Mr. Bera of 
California, introduced a bipartisan bill with Mr. Weber of 
Texas to do just that called the Grid Security Research and 
Development Act. I understand he intends to reintroduce this 
bill this Congress, and I look forward to working with him and 
my other colleagues on both sides of the aisle for this 
important effort.
     Today, I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses, 
some of whom were also personally affected by power outages. 
These five panelists represent some of the foremost experts in 
electricity reliability in the country, and we are honored to 
have them with us today. I hope that as the Texas Legislature 
considers what to do in response to this crisis, they will heed 
the lessons that we all share with us today.
     [The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]

    Just one month ago on Valentine's Day, Winter Storm Uri 
descended on Texas and broke cold temperature records across 
the state. Forty-eight percent of the electricity generation 
capacity for the Texas grid went offline due to frozen 
components and frozen fuel supplies. By February 16, four 
million Texas households were without power. Millions of Texans 
had no heat and no electricity for three days or more with 
temperatures well below freezing.
    At least 70 people died as a result of Winter Storm Uri and 
these power outages. One of them was just eleven years old. 
Cristian Peneda died of hypothermia after electricity was cut 
off in his family's mobile home in Conroe. He had been trying 
to stay warm under a pile of blankets with his three-year-old 
brother. An eight-year-old girl and her mother died of carbon 
monoxide poisoning in Harris County after they ran the family 
car to try to stay warm.
    And the electricity and heating crisis led to a severe 
water crisis. Water pipes burst, flooding homes. By Friday the 
19th, 12 million Texans were under a boil water advisory 
because the water supplies had fallen too low. And all of this 
happened in the midst of the greatest public health crisis this 
country has seen in a century, when families are dealing with 
lost loved ones, lost jobs, illness, and isolation.
    Texans deserve better.
    There was a lot of discussion in the immediate aftermath of 
the Texas blackouts about who to blame. There was a lot of 
misinformation and political jockeying, too. What seems clear 
already is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, 
better known as ERCOT, failed to prepare its energy 
infrastructure for extreme weather conditions. It is 
unacceptable that millions of Texans were left without power 
for days on end during one of the worst winter storms in our 
state's history.
    But I know there is more for us to examine about what 
happened in Texas, and it is our responsibility as policymakers 
to get answers. Why didn't the models used by the utilities see 
this coming? Which systems and components performed well and 
which failed? Could better demand response technologies have 
allowed the Texas grid operators to ease the burden of these 
outages? What was the role of climate change in enabling the 
conditions for this extreme weather episode? How ready is the 
electricity sector for future extreme weather events, like 
wildfires and heat waves? Will Texas be brought to its knees if 
our grid is attacked by a sophisticated adversary?
    If we can get a clear-eyed understanding of how these 
failures occurred, we can help prevent them from happening in 
the future. What Texans endured last month must not be in vain. 
We must learn from this episode and redouble our research 
efforts in support of a more reliable and resilient electricity 
sector. Last Congress, my fellow Committee Member, Mr. Bera of 
California, introduced a bipartisan bill with Mr. Weber to do 
just that, called the Grid Security Research and Development 
Act. I understand he intends to re-introduce this bill this 
Congress, and I look forward to working with him and my other 
colleagues on both sides of the aisle on this important effort.
    Today, I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses, 
some of whom were also personally affected by power outages. 
These five panelists represent some of the foremost experts in 
electricity reliability in the country, and we are honored to 
have you with us. I hope that as the Texas legislature 
considers what to do in response to this crisis, they will heed 
the lessons that you all share with us today.
    I yield to Ranking Member Lucas.

     Chairwoman Johnson. I now recognize and yield to our 
Ranking Member, Mr. Lucas.
     Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this 
important and timely hearing.
     Today, we have an opportunity to examine last month's 
blackouts in Texas and other Southern and Midwestern States. 
There is no better time to hear about the ongoing efforts by 
industry, Federal agencies, and the Department of Energy (DOE) 
national labs to learn from these events and adapt for the 
future.
     Before we begin, I'd like to express my gratitude for the 
safety of my Texas friends here, and I hope your families are 
well, and your districts, like mine, are on their way to 
recovery.
     I'd also like to commend the public utilities and member-
owned cooperatives in my State for how well they managed their 
crisis and ensure the safety of their customers and my 
constituents.
     Physical and cyber threats to our power grid are 
constantly evolving. This incident, alongside last year's 
wildfires on the West Coast and the recent solar winds cyber 
attack highlights the need for congressional action to ensure 
the security and resilience of the U.S. energy sector.
     As we discussed these events and their causes, we on the 
Science Committee have a responsibility to focus on the long-
term technological solutions that can help us prepare for and 
respond to the next trial. As the past year has shown, it's not 
a matter of if our grid will be tested again, it's a matter of 
when. The Science Committee has jurisdiction over DOE's 
electricity delivery, cybersecurity, energy security, and 
emergency response research and development (R&D) activities. 
This work is essential to maintaining the stability and 
flexibility of our grid not just for today's needs but also for 
the next generation's.
     Through its world-leading national laboratories and Grid 
Modernization Laboratory Consortium, DOE supports R&D in 
advanced grid modeling, grid energy storage, information 
sharing, and advanced control systems. By partnering with 
industry DOE can provide stakeholders with critical expertise 
and enable the deployment of new grid security tools and 
technologies.
     This morning, we will hear from Beth Garza, a Senior 
Fellow at R Street's Energy and Environmental Policy Team. She 
served as the Director of the Electric Reliability Council 
(ERCOT) of Texas, known to all of us as ERCOT, Independent 
Marketing Monitor from 2014 through 2019. Beth brings a 
critical perspective to this distinguished witness panel and 
could provide first-hand insight into ERCOT and the power 
supply industry as a whole. I look forward to her testimony 
highlighting the needs and challenges of our diverse and 
complex power delivery system.
     This hearing also will serve as an opportunity to discuss 
grid security legislation. Last year, H.R. 5760, the Grid 
Security Research and Development Act, passed by the House with 
strong bipartisan support. This legislation authorized the DOE 
(Department of Energy) research, development, and demonstration 
(RD&D) activities that focus on the discovery of innovative 
tools and technologies for energy sector security and 
resilience. The provisions of this bill were originally a 
central component of the bipartisan and bicameral Energy Act of 
2020, which became law last Congress.
     Unfortunately, due to last-minute jurisdictional claims 
from outside Committees, this bill had to be removed from the 
Energy Act at the 11th hour. I am hopeful that we can work 
together to once again introduce and pass grid security 
legislation this session, preferably this year.
     The energy sector faces unique challenges that require 
institutional knowledge and data that only the Department of 
Energy can provide. DOE is responsible for energy-critical 
infrastructure, which includes electric power, oil, and natural 
gas. It also has authority over the cybersecurity of energy 
delivery systems. Providing DOE researchers and industry with 
the tools they need to ensure the long-term security and 
resilience of our electric grid should be something we can all 
agree on.
     This Congress, I will prioritize getting these provisions 
over the finish line, working with my friends on both sides of 
the aisle to get this done. I thank our witnesses today for 
their valuable testimony at such a critical time, and I look 
forward to a productive discussion about how Federal agencies 
can work with industry to deliver affordable power to American 
homes, businesses, and essential services.
     Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back the balance of my 
time.
     [The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]

    Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson for holding this important 
and timely hearing. Today, we have an opportunity to examine 
last month's blackouts in Texas and other southern and 
midwestern states. There is no better time to hear about the 
ongoing efforts by industry, federal agencies, and the 
Department of Energy national laboratories to learn from these 
events and adapt for the future.
    Before we begin, I'd like to express my gratitude for the 
safety of my Texas friends here. I hope that your families are 
well and your districts--like mine--are on their way to a full 
recovery.
    Physical and cyber threats to our power grid are constantly 
evolving. This incident, alongside last year's wildfires on the 
West Coast and the recent SolarWinds cyber- attack, highlights 
the need for Congressional action to ensure the security and 
resilience of the U.S. energy sector. As we discuss these 
events and their causes, we on the Science Committee have a 
responsibility to focus on the long-term technological 
solutions that can help us prepare for and respond to the next 
trial. As the past year has shown, it's not a matter of if our 
grid will be tested again, it's a matter of when.
    The Science Committee has jurisdiction over DOE's 
electricity delivery, cybersecurity, energy security, and 
emergency response research and development activities. This 
work is essential to maintaining the stability and flexibility 
of our grid, not just for today's needs but also for the next 
generation's.
    Through its world-leading national laboratories and Grid 
Modernization Laboratory Consortium, DOE supports R&D in 
advanced grid modeling, grid energy storage, information 
sharing, and advanced control systems. By partnering with 
industry, DOE can provide stakeholders with critical expertise 
and enable the deployment of new grid security tools and 
technologies.
    This morning, we will hear from Beth Garza, a senior fellow 
with R Street's Energy & Environmental Policy Team. She served 
as director of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas 
(ERCOT) Independent Market Monitor from 2014 through 2019. Beth 
brings a critical perspective to this distinguished witness 
panel and can provide first-hand insight into ERCOT and the 
power supply industry as a whole. I look forward to her 
testimony highlighting the needs and challenges of our diverse 
and complex power delivery system.
    This hearing will also serve as an opportunity to discuss 
grid security legislation. Last Congress, H.R. 5760, the Grid 
Security Research and Development Act, passed the House with 
strong bipartisan support. This legislation authorizes DOE 
research, development, and demonstration activities that focus 
on the discovery of innovative tools and technologies for 
energy sector security and resilience. The provisions in this 
bill were originally a central component of the bipartisan and 
bicameral Energy Act of 2020, which became law last Congress. 
Unfortunately, due to last minute jurisdictional claims from 
outside committees, this bill had to be removed from the Energy 
Act in the 11th hour. I'm hopeful that we can work together to 
once again introduce and pass grid security legislation this 
year.
    The energy sector faces unique challenges that require 
institutional knowledge and data that only the Department of 
Energy can provide. DOE is responsible for energy critical 
infrastructure, which includes electric power, oil and natural 
gas. It also has authority over the cybersecurity of energy 
delivery systems. Providing DOE researchers and industry with 
the tools they need to ensure the long-term security and 
resiliency of our electric grid should be something we can all 
agree on. This Congress I will prioritize getting these 
provisions over the finish line, working with my friends on 
both sides of the aisle to get this done.
    I thank our witnesses today for their valuable testimony at 
such a critical time. I look forward to a productive discussion 
about how federal agencies can work with industry to deliver 
affordable power to American homes, businesses, and essential 
services.
    Thank you Madam Chair and I yield back the balance of my 
time.

     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.
     And at this time if there are persons who would wish to 
submit a statement for the record, you're welcome to do that.
     I'd like now to introduce our witnesses. Dr. Jesse Jenkins 
is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University with a joint 
appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace 
Engineering, and the Andlinger Center for Energy and 
Environment. Dr. Jenkins also leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, the 
Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization 
Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering systems and a 
master's in technology and policy from the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology (MIT).
     Dr. Varun Rai is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Professor in 
the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas 
(UT) at Austin. He is the Director of the UT Energy Institute 
and Associate Dean for Research in the LBJ School. He received 
his Ph.D. and his master's in mechanical engineering from 
Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in mechanical 
engineering from Indian Institute of Technology.
     Dr. Juan Torres is the Associate Laboratory Director of 
Energy Systems Integration at the National Renewable Energy 
Laboratory (NREL). In this role, he oversees NREL's research to 
modernize and strengthen the security, resilience, and 
sustainability of the Nation's electrical grid. Prior to his 
time at NREL, he had a 27-year career at Sandia National 
Laboratories. Mr. Torres holds a bachelor's degree in 
electronic engineering technology from the University of 
Southern Colorado, a master's degree in electrical engineering 
from the University of New Mexico.
     Ms. Beth Garza is a Senior Fellow with R Street's Energy 
and Environmental Policy Team. Ms. Garza previously served as 
the Director of Electric Reliability Council of Texas, 
Independent Market Monitor from 2014 through 2019 after serving 
as a Deputy Director since 2008. She is a graduate of the 
University of Missouri and a registered professional engineer 
in the State of Texas.
     Last but certainly not least, Dr. Sue Tierney is a Senior 
Advisor at Analysis Group, an economic consulting firm located 
in Boston. She is a former Assistant Secretary for Policy at 
the U.S. Department of Energy, State Cabinet Officer for 
Environmental Affairs, and State Public Utility Commissioner 
and has more than 35 years of experience in this field. Her 
master's degree and Ph.D. in regional planning are from Cornell 
University.
     I want to thank all of our outstanding witnesses for 
joining us today. And as our witnesses should know, you will 
have 5 minutes for your spoken testimony. Your written 
testimony will be included in the record for the hearing. When 
you have completed your spoken testimony, we will begin our 
questions. Each Member will have 5 minutes to question you as a 
panel.
     Now we will start with Dr. Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins, you may 
begin your testimony.

      TESTIMONY OF DR. JESSE JENKINS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

            OF MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING,

                  ANDLINGER CENTER FOR ENERGY

          AND THE ENVIRONMENT AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

     Dr. Jenkins. Thank you, and good morning. My name is Jesse 
Jenkins, and I must note that the views expressed in this 
testimony are my own and I am not speaking as a Representative 
of Princeton University.
     I'd like to first thank Chair Johnson and Ranking Member 
Lucas and the Members of this Committee for inviting my 
testimony, and I commend the Committee for holding this hearing 
and for trying to get to the bottom of what went wrong in Texas 
during last month's extreme cold. The truth is there is plenty 
of blame to go around. The failures to plan for and build 
resilience to this extreme cold were systemic. All sources of 
power experienced failures from natural gas and coal plants to 
wind turbines and even one of the State's four nuclear 
reactors.
     The energy crisis was not limited just to the power 
system. Natural gas wells and pipelines also froze, cutting off 
gas supply just as it was needed most. And State and Federal 
policymakers alike all failed to require more robust 
winterization measures after a 2011 storm provided ample 
warning of the fragility of Texas's energy infrastructure to 
extreme cold.
     These systemic failures make it easy to cherry-pick claims 
that advance one's preferred narrative, but the dozens of 
Texans who died and the millions who suffered through the 
crisis deserve a full account of what went wrong. And now is 
the time to learn from the crisis and to take steps to prepare 
for the extreme weather that all Americans face, threats that 
climate change is making more severe.
     Energy systems can and should be made more resilient with 
existing technology. After all, wind turbines operate today in 
Antarctica, gas plants in Alberta, and gas wells in Alaska. Of 
course, weatherizing our infrastructure comes at an added cost 
that must be paid back every year in the hopes that devastating 
but rare crises are avoided. In this way, building resilience 
to extreme events is a bit like buying fire insurance for your 
home. Most of us buy insurance not because we ever expect our 
homes to burn, but we know that if such a tragedy should occur, 
we'd lose everything, and building our lives back may be 
impossible. So we pay the premium every year. Determining how 
much insurance in the form of investment in grid resilience is 
worth it, and what kinds of crises we wish to protect against 
is thus the key question.
     Answering this question is more difficult now than ever 
because the changing climate means the past is no longer a safe 
guide to the future. Extreme weather events are dangerous 
because our critical infrastructures are resilient only up to a 
point. When pushed a little bit further, a few degrees colder 
or hotter, an inch more rain, these systems can fail in 
catastrophic ways.
     This is where research can make a difference. Expanded 
investment in climate science could help planners build more 
resilient systems. This research should focus on assessing 
impacts on critical infrastructures and identifying 
catastrophic failure modes.
     We must also look forward to the technologies needed to 
build a resilient, affordable, and clean electricity system. We 
can see a glimpse of this feature in Texas where wind and solar 
provide a quarter of all electricity in 2020, more than 2.5 
times the national average. Yet during this crisis, wind and 
solar provided at times a tiny fraction of their maximum 
output, leaving some to question can we assure a clean and 
resilient grid with a larger role for wind and solar power? The 
answer is yes, and to understand why, we need to understand the 
role of each resource in our electricity system.
     We don't need every source of electricity to be reliable 
at all times. What we need is the system to be reliable, and 
that requires a mix of electricity resources all playing the 
right role. Wind and solar don't deliver value by being 
dependable. Everyone knows the wind is inconstant and the night 
affects solar output. Wind and solar deliver real value as 
fuel-saving resources. When available, these resources displace 
costlier sources of electricity from fuel-consuming resources 
like natural gas and coal. That saves billions of dollars and 
helps reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
     What we also need is to maintain sufficient firm 
generating capacity to deliver necessary reliability. Firm 
resources are technologies that are available on-demand any 
time of the year for as long as needed. These characteristics 
make firm resources a critical complement to weather-dependent 
renewable energy sources, as well as resources like batteries 
that are best suited to fast bursts of use rather than 
sustained output over several days or weeks.
     For instance, Princeton's Net-Zero America study, which I 
co-authored, finds that the United States needs to maintain a 
similar magnitude of firm generating capacity as we have today 
as the Nation makes a big but affordable transition to net zero 
greenhouse gas emissions.
     Over the next decade existing gas capacity and nuclear 
reactors can act as firm resources and ensure reliability as 
wind and solar expand and displace coal and gas-fired 
generation. But reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity 
systems will ultimately require sufficient clean firm capacity, 
and the time to invest in these technologies is now. Wind, 
solar, lithium ion batteries took decades to improve, including 
funding from R&D, demonstration and creation of early market 
opportunities through subsidies and standards. This proven 
process of making clean energy cheap must now be replicated for 
a full portfolio of clean firm technologies.
     In the Energy Act of 2020, this Committee worked on a 
bipartisan basis to enact critical new authorizations to 
advance many of these innovative clean firm technologies. More 
effort and investment will be required to scale up and improve 
these technologies in the years ahead beginning with 
appropriations this year to make new authorizations a reality.
     Thank you for having me today, and I look forward to 
engaging with you on these critical questions.
     [The prepared statement of Dr. Jenkins follows:]
 [GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
    
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Jenkins.
     Dr. Varun Rai.

                  TESTIMONY OF DR. VARUN RAI,

                  ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR RESEARCH;

                  PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS,

                  LBJ SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

              AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

     Dr. Rai. Thank you, Chair Johnson. Good morning, everyone. 
Good morning to Ranking Member Lucas and other Members of the 
Committee. My name is Varun Rai. I'm a Professor at the 
University of Texas at Austin, and thank you for the 
opportunity to appear before you for this important hearing.
     I live in Austin, Texas. Texas-wide power outages started 
early morning on the 15th of February, affecting more than 4 
million homes and businesses over 3 days. Inside our house, the 
temperature went down into the 30's for several days. It was 
like living inside of a refrigerator for days. Sadly, some of 
my fellow Texans died due to the crisis and aren't around to 
tell their tales.
     There were three key contributors to the severity of the 
impact. First, equipment in both power generation and gas 
production systems froze. After another blackout in Texas in 
2011, winterization of both power and gas equipment was 
identified as a high-priority item. Some changes were made 
based on those recommendations, but most standards are 
requirements tied to operational performance in extreme cold 
were set. This has meant that there is insufficient overall 
investment in winterization of the energy system in Texas.
     Second, there were gaffes in communication and 
coordination. As part of ERCOT's load shedding, power to many 
oil and gas field operations were shut down, which meant a 
further strain on gas production on top of declines in 
production due to the weather. Power was also lost at water 
treatment and pumping facilities across the State. On the 
customer side, there was an absolute lack of coordinated, 
consistent, and timely emergency communication to the people of 
Texas. This translated the extreme weather-induced stress on 
the power system into a severe humanitarian crisis.
     Third, even with clear warning of a severe weather event 
days and even weeks ahead, there were not enough calls in 
advance to reduce demand and conserve energy, including both 
electricity and gas. In my view, not mobilizing enough 
voluntary demand reduction during the weather event was the 
single biggest lost opportunity to minimize the impacts of the 
crisis.
     Looking ahead, to learn fully from the Texas power crisis 
of February 2021 there are five questions that need further and 
immediate research to support decisionmaking. Over 4 million 
homes and businesses in Texas lost power during the crisis. 
Power outage led to a water crisis. The power and water 
failures put millions of Texans under extreme physical, mental, 
and financial stress. The load sheds were based on 
unsophisticated critical-load lists, which did not account for 
infrastructure interdependency, thus we need research and--to 
design load-management strategies to minimize extreme stress 
for households , taking into account the interdependent nature 
of critical infrastructure and implications for fairness and 
equity.
     Some early estimates put the damages and economic losses 
upwards of $100 billion. The full scale and scope of costs and 
losses are multifaceted, for example, damages to water 
infrastructure and loss production at manufacturing facilities 
and bankruptcies of companies and local utilities and local 
governments. We should consider all these factors when 
evaluating the benefits and costs of infrastructure 
investments. There is critical need to support research that 
advances a more robust and comprehensive accounting and 
understanding of the full scale of damages that result from 
extreme events.
     As I mentioned before, one of the biggest failures in the 
days leading up to the event was how poorly the demand side was 
engaged. Demand flexibility, both programmatic and voluntary, 
will inevitably need to play a much larger and effective role 
in the future to maintain system reliability in the face of 
extreme events. Achieving that flexibility at very large scale 
and over short timeframes of hours and days is an important 
area of further research.
     To outside observers, during much of the crisis there was 
very little information and data about the status of the system 
and how it might evolve. People were not just in power 
darkness; they were also in information darkness. To address 
this, there is a need to design data-sharing mechanisms and 
collaborative efforts, including researchers at universities 
and national labs with appropriate data-governance mechanisms 
to enable monitoring, analysis, feedback, and problem-solving 
by the broader community around and during crises.
     With the frequency of extreme weather events expected to 
increase as impacts of climate change unfold further, the need 
to understand the long-term benefits and cost of connecting 
ERCOT to the U.S. Eastern and Western grids is also immediate. 
In particular, we need research that accounts for climate-
induced stresses on the energy system, systemwide 
vulnerabilities and options, changing energy mix, and changing 
nature of demand.
     Thank you again for the opportunity to present at this 
hearing, and I look forward to the discussion.
     [The prepared statement of Dr. Rai follows:]
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     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Rai.
     Mr. Juan Torres.

                 TESTIMONY OF MR. JUAN TORRES,

                 ASSOCIATE LABORATORY DIRECTOR,

                   ENERGY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

              NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY

     Mr. Torres. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, 
Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to 
discuss [inaudible]. I commend the Committee for this timely 
hearing, as it will inform research that will help guide the 
Nation toward a more secure and resilient energy future. My 
name is Juan Torres, and I serve as the Associate Laboratory 
Director for Energy Systems Integration at the U.S. Department 
of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, in 
Golden, Colorado. I've been affiliated with Federal research in 
our national laboratory system for over 30 years. In my current 
position, I direct NREL's efforts to strengthen the security 
resilience and sustainability of our Nation's electric grid. In 
addition, I'm Co-Chair for the DOE Grid Modernization 
Laboratory Consortium and Technical Lead for its Security and 
Resilience Teams.
     I observed the catastrophic failures of the Texas energy 
system not just as a research engineer but as a concerned 
parent, as both of my children reside in Texas. My son works in 
Austin and my daughter is a graduate student in Irving. The 
severity of the event was clear when the conversations with 
them became do you have enough food, water, and blankets? Sit 
in your car and run it to charge your phone and get warm. 
Tragically, many others in the Texas community had it much 
worse.
     It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention. 
I can say that we have many needs with regards to the power 
grid, but I'm also hopeful because we as a nation have the 
innovation and horsepower to meet these needs. But where do we 
start? First, we need to understand where we came from and 
where we're going. There is no single owner, operator, or 
architect for the U.S. power system. It is an engineering 
marvel influenced by a collective of stakeholders over more 
than a century.
     Recent years have seen the grid evolve from a network 
based on large, centralized generation to a hybrid system 
incorporating more distributed renewable resources. Significant 
changes are also occurring at the grid edge near the consumer. 
Never before has a consumer been more proactive and engaged 
with the operation of the grid. Real-time pricing, transactive 
energy, smart appliances and lighting, grid-interactive 
buildings and smart loads, electric vehicles, and residential 
photovoltaics are just some of the technologies transforming 
the edge of the grid. And we have yet to understand the long-
term energy impacts that innovations resulting from COVID-19's 
influence on the work-from-home culture.
     Equally important is awareness of the dynamic threat space 
which includes not only severe weather but also physical 
attacks, geomagnetic disturbances, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) 
events, and the ever-growing cyber threat. I offer the 
following recommendations based on critical lessons from the 
recent outage in Texas and other past major storm events.
     First, take actions to harden the grid and generation 
fleet to the broad spectrum of evolving threats for improved 
monitoring, planning, investments, and technology advancements.
     Second, address the overall resilience of the energy 
system from fuel to generation, to delivery, to end-use, taking 
into account interdependent infrastructure such as 
communication systems, natural gas pipelines, and 
transportation systems.
     Third, research how a grid with more controllable devices 
and increasingly high penetrations of variable renewable 
generation can be even more secure and resilient than today's 
grid.
     While these challenges are considerable, research is 
lighting the path forward. Let me give you some examples. DOE's 
Grid Modernization Initiative (GMI) and the 14 national labs in 
the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium have been working 
with industry and academia to tackle grid research challenges 
over the past 5 years in devices, advanced architectures and 
controls, design and planning tools, generation, sensors, 
regulatory policy support, and security and resilience.
     NAERM, the North American Energy Resilience Model, is a 
DOE multi-lab comprehensive modeling capability being developed 
to support grid planning and investment and to understand the 
grid's state of resilience while considering interdependencies 
with the natural gas and communication sectors.
     ARIES, NREL's state-of-the-art Advanced Research on 
Integrated Energy Systems platform, is leading the way for 
large-scale experimentation and cyber emulation of the future 
grid from behind the meter to the bulk transmission system. 
We've only just opened the door to many new research 
directions.
     Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I 
look forward to any questions you may have.
     [The prepared statement of Mr. Torres follows:]
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     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much, Mr. Torres.
     Ms. Beth Garza.

                  TESTIMONY OF MS. BETH GARZA,

               SENIOR FELLOW, R STREET INSTITUTE

     Ms. Garza. Thank you. Good morning, Chairwoman Johnson, 
Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee. Before I 
get started, I want to add my recognition to the tremendous 
human impacts suffered by Texans during the February winter 
storms. I'm sure the efforts of this Committee will help ensure 
that the U.S. infrastructure--excuse me--becomes better able to 
withstand the challenges that it faces.
     Today, I'm going to discuss three areas where research 
would be of most value. These are forecasting, the 
weatherization or winterization of power plants and their fuel 
supply, and the third area is the improved granularity of 
operation and control of demand within the electricity 
distribution systems.
     So starting with forecasting, demand for electricity is 
very sensitive to weather conditions, primarily temperature, 
and as an industry, we've become very good at forecasting 
customer demand based on foreseeable weather conditions. 
However, if we had a better long-term view of potential weather 
conditions, system preparedness and resiliency would improve.
     ERCOT prepares and publishes an assessment of demand and 
supply for each season. Unfortunately, their forecast for 
extreme demand this past winter was based on weather 
experienced during February 2011. The weather conditions 
actually experienced this year were much were much more severe. 
I believe all electric utility systems would benefit from new 
forecasting tools and techniques to ensure their longer-range 
planning is preparing them for the conditions that they may 
face.
     Moving on to the winterization of supply, I caution that 
it's too early to draw detailed conclusions about the causes of 
all of the generator outages that we--that resulted in the 
curtailment of firm load, but based on preliminary data, it is 
clear that every type of generation--nuclear, coal, natural 
gas, wind, and solar--were limited in some manner during the 
extreme cold that we experienced.
     Also, based on preliminary data, generator outages were 
primarily the result of insufficient weatherization and fuel 
supply disruptions. I've heard that maybe half of the outages 
that natural gas plants--power plants were due to the lack of 
fuel delivered at sufficient volumes and pressures. It's too 
early to draw specific conclusions other than to recognize the 
codependence of electricity and natural gas systems, especially 
in Texas.
     Much has been made of the lack of mandatory winterization 
standards for power plants, and I suggest that it's easy to say 
that winterization should be mandatory, but effective 
regulations require a specific standard to be met, and any such 
standard should also have benefits that exceed cost. And one of 
the challenges power plants and natural gas system owners in 
Texas face is appropriately assessing the winterization 
benefits due to the relative infrequency of very cold weather. 
Winterization comes in various forms with different costs and 
performance implications, and understanding these costs and 
performance tradeoffs will be very valuable to the standard-
setting process.
     My last point has to do with distribution system 
improvements. Texas has an expansive advanced metering 
infrastructure. Preliminary results indicate that the Texas 
smart grid was not managed in a particularly smart manner. For 
example, the General Manager of Austin Energy, my local public 
power utility, described our advanced meters as capable of 
being disconnected remotely but requiring a person in the field 
to reconnect.
     This same topic came up during a recent hearing at the 
Texas legislature where an executive from CenterPoint Energy, 
which serves the greater Houston area, described different 
limitations preventing them from using their advanced meters to 
manage curtailment. And limitations as I've heard them 
described seem to be a lack of supplemental technologies 
combined with institutional and policy differences. The same 
improvements that could have eased the burden of these lengthy 
outages to a subset of customers could also form the foundation 
for demand to express their willingness to pay and receive 
higher reliability. The ability to use scarce supply to serve 
demand, which values it the most, is the foundation of economic 
efficiency.
     I look forward to your questions. Thank you.
     [The prepared statement of Ms. Garza follows:]
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     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much, Ms. Garza.
     Dr. Sue Tierney.

                 TESTIMONY OF DR. SUE TIERNEY,

                 SENIOR ADVISOR, ANALYSIS GROUP

     Dr. Tierney. Good morning, Chairman--Chairwoman Johnson, 
Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee. My name is 
Sue Tierney. Although I am testifying today on my own behalf, I 
also share various grid resiliency and research-related 
recommendations from two recent National Academies of Sciences 
Committees on which I have served.
     The recent power outages in Texas led to extremely 
challenging living conditions for millions of people and of 
course the tragedy of 70 people having lost their lives. It 
disrupted access to critical services like heating and water 
supply. This crisis highlights the critical role that reliable 
and resilient electric service plays in the health and well-
being of Americans.
     It is clear that steps could have been taken by State 
officials, grid operators, and energy companies in Texas that 
would have lessened the extent of the crisis in these human 
hardships. These events cry out for the need for further 
research to ensure a resilient electric supply, especially as 
we anticipate worsening and more frequent extreme weather 
conditions in the decades ahead.
     The Federal Government has an essential role to play here. 
As the Academies of Sciences' 2017 report on enhancing the 
resiliency of the electric grid pointed out--and I'm quoting 
here--``The Department of Energy is the Federal entity with a 
mission to focus on the longer-term issues of developing and 
promulgating technologies and strategies to increase the 
resilience and modernization of the grid.'' No other entity in 
the United States has the mission to support such work. This is 
a public good. If funding were not provided by the Federal 
Government, this gap in research won't be filled by the States 
or the private sector. In short, this is a role for the Federal 
Government.
     In my written testimony, I discussed factors that affected 
the power outages in Texas and related research needs. Because 
others on the panel have already talked about the Texas 
electricity crisis, I would only add a couple of points. Texas 
is the only State in the United States with an electric 
industry structure that combines an energy-only competitive 
wholesale market and mandatory customer choice among 
competitive retail suppliers. This is largely viewed by 
academic economists as having been a successful electricity 
market design, although some observers, including myself, have 
questioned whether such an approach that relies explicitly on 
the expectation of very high electricity prices, at times power 
shortages, is politically sustainable in the event that such 
conditions actually occur.
     Now, for several years the North American Electric 
Reliability Council (NERC) pointed--has pointed out ERCOT's 
slim reserve margins as contributing to reliability risks. 
Texas previously experienced winter conditions which created 
electric reliability problems. In following up on 
investigations in 2011, the staff of the Federal Energy 
Research--Regulatory--excuse me, Regulatory Commission (FERC) 
and NERC said the outages could have been avoided, and they 
encouraged State policymakers to adopt policies to encourage 
performance of the system under stressful conditions. However, 
for the most part, policymakers and the electric and gas 
industries in Texas did not act on these recommendations, and 
this set the stage for the events in February this year. 
Clearly, these are a chilling reminder of the critical need for 
reliable and resilient electricity in the--our basic needs.
     Although the Texas electricity crisis was an unusual 
event, it could happen anywhere, and proactive steps should be 
taken to lower the risk impacts of the occurrences. The 2017 
Reliability and Resilience Report from the National Academies, 
along with a new report in February 2021 on the future of the 
power system, identified grid resilience as a key issue. In my 
written testimony, I have provided seven pages of findings and 
recommendations from these two studies, and I won't go through 
them here. Let me just mention a very short set.
     First, we conclude that research--scientific research and 
applied development and demonstration programs related to the 
electric industry should be tripled. That's for science, and 
much more of this support should be in multiyear 
appropriations.
     I see my time is up, and I would encourage the Committee 
to take a careful look at my written testimony for the 
additional recommendations. And I appreciate so much the 
Committee's attention to these important issues. Thank you.
     [The prepared statement of Dr. Tierney follows:]
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     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
     At this point we will begin our first round of questions, 
and I will recognize myself for 5 minutes. Dr. Rai, you pointed 
out that ERCOT's strategy for implementing load curtailment in 
order to keep demand and supply roughly even while generation 
supplies were out was basically all or nothing. Rather than 
users curtailing part of their electricity demand by lowering 
their thermostats or cutting some of their electricity use, 
entire subnetworks were either on or off. Is this how Houston 
got into the infuriating situation where people were freezing 
in their homes and yet when they looked across the way at 
downtown, all the buildings were lit up and electrified with no 
one inside?
     And the second question, how could a smarter load 
management strategy provide for more equity in grid operations 
during an emergency so that low-income neighborhoods don't take 
it all on the chin more than others? Dr. Rai, could you 
enlighten us a bit?
     Dr. Rai. Thank you so much for that question, Chairwoman 
Johnson. Your sense is right. The severity of the supply 
disruption was so high that in many parts, in most parts of 
Texas only critical load and critical circuits were kept alive. 
Everything--all the load-critical circuits, a majority of them, 
were shed. And that meant that the noncritical load that are 
part of the critical load circuits that were kept alive, they 
also stayed on, and there was not much ability, again, just 
because of the severity and the depth of the event to rotate 
outages.
     And so that's linked very much to your second part of the 
question, Chairwoman Johnson, in terms of being able to rotate 
the outages and being fair and equitable about it. It did mean 
that there were several parts across Texas where lower-income 
communities did have to weather more brunt of the whole event. 
And so as we heard from Ms. Garza, a much more granular 
approach to how this--these events are managed, the 
technologies do exist, but they do operate also in the 
underlying regulatory as well as operational context. And 
taking a holistic look at that is extremely important, but it 
is very possible and is one of the top priorities--it is one of 
the most low-hanging fruits there, Chairwoman.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Jenkins, you 
spoke in your testimony about the evidence tells us that caused 
these blackouts. I'd like to ask just a quick yes or no answer. 
Forbes published an op-ed in February of 2017 which claimed 
that a renewably sourced energy captures a larger share of the 
power grid. Outages become inevitable. Is this true?
     Dr. Jenkins. No, that's not true. If power systems 
maintain sufficient firm generation that complement wind and 
solar, we can maintain reliability and expand the role of wind 
and solar, lowering costs and lowering carbon dioxide 
emissions.
     Chairwoman Johnson. The Texas Public Policy Foundation 
published a statement in February--on February the 16th which 
claimed that fossil fuel electric generation didn't fail. Is 
that true?
     Dr. Jenkins. That's not correct. We had over 30,000 
megawatts of fossil generation capacity that was on forced 
outage during the crisis making up the bulk of the total 
electricity shortfall during the blackout, so natural gas power 
plants in particular were the largest absolute contributor to 
generation outages during the events.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. In the same statement, the 
Texas Public Policy Foundation claimed that blackouts never 
would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply 
penetrated by renewable energy sources. Is that true?
     Dr. Jenkins. That's not correct. There was sufficient firm 
generation capacity installed that if it had operated as 
intended, it would have supplied adequate supplies for the 
system. The Texas system operator plans on as little as 1,700 
megawatts of contribution from wind and solar power during 
extreme winter events such as that occurred in February, and so 
just a small fraction of what Texas was counting on to be there 
was wind and solar power. What Texans were counting on were 
natural gas and other firm power sources, and when those firm 
power sources fail, that's when widespread blackouts can occur.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. My time is 
expired. I'll now call on our Ranking Member Mr. Lucas for 5 
minutes of questions.
     Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair. My home district in 
Oklahoma was also impacted by last month's winter storms and 
great interruptions. And while data is still being collected, 
one thing is clear. No single energy source, be it coal, wind, 
or natural gas, carries all the blame. The fact is a diverse 
supply of affordable, reliable energy sources is essential to 
the success of our power delivery system.
     Ms. Garza, Mr. Torres, how will the adoption of new energy 
sources and hybrid energy systems affect how Congress and the 
Federal Government should be addressing grid security and 
resilience? And whichever one would care to go first.
     Ms. Garza. Well, you said my name first, so I guess I'll 
go first, Mr. Lucas. You--your comment was dead on. It--we all 
benefit from--I believe we all benefit from a wide variety of 
energy sources, and so with that we have to recognize common 
causes of failure across all of those sources. But just having 
more and different types of generation should prove to be more 
reliable rather than relying all on one.
     Mr. Lucas. Mr. Torres?
     Mr. Torres. Thank you for the question, Representative 
Lucas. What I see is that the evolution of renewables here, 
we're still at a state where we're not putting the same 
expectations on those renewables as we have on some of the 
legacy baseload types of generation or other fossil generation. 
For example, you know, I gave a testimony not long ago on black 
start, so putting those kinds of requirements so we can start 
to build that in to some of the new emerging technologies is 
really important.
     One of the other differences is, as renewables are coming 
into play a bigger part of our energy portfolio, they're not 
located as just centralized generation plants but also as 
distributed resources. So now we can generate power, you know, 
at--near the loads at homes and businesses, and that gives us 
different opportunities to use renewables for things like 
microgrids to provide some local resiliency for critical loads. 
So this is actually--the new technologies are giving us new 
opportunities and potential that we haven't had before with 
strictly centralized generation.
     Mr. Lucas. This Congress I plan to reintroduce my bill, 
the Securing American Leadership in Science and Technology Act, 
which calls for the doubling of funding in DOE's Office of 
Science. Ms. Garza, what research is needed for technologies 
like advanced sensors and controls to assist the grid in 
emergency response?
     Ms. Garza. So the--so some of the challenges we face in 
terms of the outages and how those curtailments are managed, 
they are managed in a very blocky manner if you will. And how 
that works is a device in a substation is open, cutting off 
electricity to hundreds if not a couple of thousands of 
customers. And those actions are required to be taken very 
quickly, and that's how, you know, over the centuries we 
realized how to do it.
     But technology exists to allow those very fast actions--I 
believe exist to allow those very fast actions to occur in a 
more granular level. We don't need to take out a whole feeder 
at once where along that feeder you could have some critical 
loads, there are some noncritical loads, there are some, you 
know, differing levels of reliability requirements for all of 
those customers. And by knowing that across your system, it 
seems like we could manage the reaction or the response in a 
much more granular and a much more targeted level than we're 
able to do now, and that in my mind requires software sensors, 
you know, all the whizbang stuff that needs to exist to allow 
that to occur.
     Mr. Lucas. Mr. Torres, in the time I have remaining how 
can fundamental research in areas like materials science and 
advanced computing support this work, this effort?
     Mr. Torres. I believe that there's opportunity to develop 
more inherently resilient materials that will comprise the grid 
of the future, so building your resilience into the system from 
the ground up, make it an inherent element in how we operate 
and how we design our systems. There is opportunities with 
things like artificial intelligence to help us better assess 
with forecasting information how to optimize operation of the 
grid. We can also utilize distributed computing to help us 
manage and operate the grid much differently than we do today 
where we operate in very, very centralized control 
architecture.
     Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. And I will ask 
the Clerk now to assist us in going to our Members for 
questions.
     Staff. Mr. Bera is next.
     Mr. Bera. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman and to the Ranking 
Member, for convening this hearing. Obviously, very timely and 
incredibly important.
     I also, you know, appreciate the Raking Member's comments, 
but, you know, if we take the politics out of this, it's not, 
you know, one type of electrical source versus another versus 
another. It's what can we do to create redundancy here and 
redundant sources. And if we could remove the politics, you 
know, we could let the science and entrepreneurial spirit of 
America address these issues. And, you know, far too often it's 
the politics that prevent us from recognizing that our climate 
is changing, that we're having more extreme events that are 
occurring similar to the winter snowstorm in Texas but also in 
my home State of California. We see increasing wind events that 
have led to, you know, wildfires, you know, they have now led 
to rolling blackouts when we see the wind starting to pick up. 
And, you know, that is unfortunately going to become more 
common, not less common.
     Part of the reason we have introduced in the last few 
Congresses the Grid Security Research and Development Act was 
we do have to make those investments in research in both the 
physical security of our electrical grid but also the cyber 
risk that our electrical grid faces. And, you know, I'm pleased 
that the Chairwoman and the Ranking Member, we passed it out of 
Committee and we passed it out of the House twice last year, 
did not quite get across the finish line, but we're going to 
reintroduce that act, which is bipartisan and, you know, get 
that through the Senate and get that to the President's desk. 
And we think that would be a big first step.
     You know, maybe a question for Dr. Tierney. You talked 
about the Academy and some of the recommendations that the 
Academy was making in terms of research but also security. 
Could you expand on some of those recommendations and, you 
know, if we were to prioritize where we ought to focus, you 
know, what your recommendations would be?
     Dr. Tierney. Thank you for that great question, 
Representative Bera. And speaking on behalf of myself, I think 
this--the bill that you plan to introduce is a very powerful 
tool to help with security and resilience in the face of 
cybersecurity events and other kinds of events as well.
     So the 2021 report called ``The Future of the Electric 
Grid'' included a number of recommendations regarding 
congressional authorization, appropriations, and DOE 
implementation of RD&D related to cybersecurity in particular. 
First, one of the things that we called for was--is the 
updating periodically of research and development roadmaps with 
regard to cyber. The world is changing very fast in this way, 
and it--at the moment, the research agenda is not keeping up 
with the changes that are in place. That would involve a number 
of things associated with capability to visualize what's going 
on in the grid, information detection and controls, sensor data 
in order to capture that kind of information, critical needs 
for a workforce in this area that is really up to snuff. There 
are very serious needs in terms of developing the expertise.
     I know you have limited time in here, so I'll stop there 
and follow up if you'd like.
     Mr. Bera. OK. Fantastic. You know, it occurs to me that, 
you know, one of the--you know, our energy rates in California 
obviously are higher than the rates in Texas, and, you know, 
while the Federal Government doesn't dictate what States 
charge, you know, our user rates are higher because, you know, 
we have tried to create that redundancy and so forth. And, you 
know, my impression is Texas rates are lower because they had 
chosen not to, you know, do some of the physical measures to 
protect against these extreme weather events.
     Again, I understand the independence of Texas and, you 
know, we can't go in there and tell them you've got to raise 
your rates and--what levers do we have, you know, again, 
wanting to protect the citizens of Texas from another extreme 
event like this? And, again, I don't know who best to answer 
that question, but, you know, what are things that we could do 
to compel Texans to do the right thing to protect their 
citizens?
     Dr. Tierney. Well, it is the case that Texas is 
independent from a--from Federal supervision under the Federal 
Power Act on rates, but for reliability purposes, Texas is 
under the supervision of the North American Electric 
Reliability Council, and that has implemented authority from 
Congress through the FERC to address reliability. So there is 
room there under current authority to put much stronger 
incentives at least for Texas to adopt different behaviors.
     Mr. Bera. Right. Just, again, knowing many Texans, my 
preference isn't to tell the Texans what to do. Congressman 
Sessions would get mad at me if I did that. But it's to work 
together as the United States of America to make sure we 
protect all our citizens.
     So with that I'll yield back, Madam Chairwoman.
     Staff. Mr. Posey is next.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Mr. Posey.
     Mr. Posey. Thank you. And I really appreciate 
Congresswoman Johnson for holding this hearing.
     My questions are for Mr. Torres. Grid security is American 
security. Do you agree with that statement?
     Mr. Torres. I do.
     Mr. Posey. Thank you. Any component plugged into the grid 
must be beyond reproach and ideally a source from trusted 
suppliers that are not affiliated with or controlled by or 
manufactured by an adversarial country like China. This 
approach will support our energy independence. On page 8 of 
your testimony you rightly mentioned that the new rise in 
cybersecurity vulnerabilities are real, especially as it 
relates to new energy technologies, and one trend that is a 
challenge for the system resilience according to you is the 
loss in control and knowledge of the technology supply chain. 
Could you explain to this Committee how the Department of 
Energy has a system reliance challenge involving the loss of 
control and knowledge of the technology supply chain?
     Mr. Torres. Sure. What I meant to say there--and I can 
elaborate on that--is the fact that the grid and the elements 
that we're putting in the grid are driven by the market, and we 
operate and we procure energy components in a global market. 
And even when we purchase equipment and systems today from a 
U.S. vendor, that doesn't necessarily imply that everything in 
that system or device comes--is all manufactured by that vendor 
because they typically buy subcomponents, other software 
elements from vendors that can be global. It could be centered 
in other countries. It could be chipsets, it could be firmware, 
it could be software and other pieces of hardware that comprise 
the system that we don't necessarily always have full control 
over.
     So understanding and providing some sort of guidance for 
how we can track what goes into those critical elements, 
especially when we're talking about things like black start 
and, you know, if the power grid entirely is blacked out, it 
could take days to weeks, maybe even longer to restart the--a 
large part of the grid. And so we have to be fully aware and 
confident in everything that's in the grid when we're 
restarting it.
     So those kinds of things I don't believe exist, especially 
for those kinds of procedures don't exist in the policies and 
directions of where we're going with some of the newer 
technologies. We don't have the same expectations for some of 
the new technologies yet. We've been managing nuclear power 
plants and coal plants and gas plants for a long time, and we 
know how to do that, but we don't necessarily understand it as 
technologies are evolving what we need to do for things that 
may be added to the grid in the future.
     Mr. Posey. Yes, I hope that we can all agree it would be 
stupid for us to have power grids full of Chinese chip 
components. On May 1 of 2020, former President Trump signed an 
Executive Order 13920 to prohibit the acquisition of 
installation of certain bulk power system electrical equipment 
sourced from foreign adversaries that pose a demonstrated undue 
risk. Are you familiar with the bulk power Executive Order that 
was signed and suspended by the current President until April 
20th with Executive Order 13990?
     Mr. Torres. Yes, I am.
     Mr. Posey. Do you know if the current Administration plans 
to reinstate the Executive order to ensure America's grid 
security?
     Mr. Torres. I do not know.
     Mr. Posey. If you find out, would you be kind enough to 
let us know?
     Mr. Torres. I will work with the Department of Energy to 
provide you all the information that I can.
     Mr. Posey. Thank you very much, Mr. Torres. Madam Chair, I 
yield back.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
     Staff. Ms. Stevens is next.
     Ms. Stevens. Thank you so much. Usually those of us in the 
North--Northern States make the quips about how our friends in 
Southern States, you know, aren't used to cold weather. The 
reality is in this case there isn't a quip to make because the 
crisis and the event that took place in Texas and in Oklahoma 
was catastrophic. And the history books will remember that the 
Chairwoman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee 
brought us together for this hearing to get an understanding of 
the research needs that must go in to making sure that we have 
a grid that works. Lives were lost, people were put into tons 
of pain, business was impacted, and in the United States of 
America this is just something we never want to see, in the 
middle of a pandemic, mind you. So I appreciate all the expert 
and--you know, expert witness testimony here today.
     I did mention that I come from Michigan, and much of our 
conversation as it pertains to the grid in my State is focusing 
on electric vehicles. And I did want to ask a couple of you--
and I think you all may be equipped to lean in on this--but how 
equipped is our grid for the arrival of electric vehicles in 
the sense that they are right now comprising one percent of 
cars on the road with projection to go much higher than that? 
And even if we--you know, I think much higher than we are, we 
have to look at grid capacity. So I'd just--I'd be--you know, 
Beth, I see you're nodding your head. If you want to jump in, 
that would be great.
     Ms. Garza. So I think--thank you for the question. It's a 
great question. It's certainly one that's being discussed and 
deliberated in, you know, the energy policy world. There 
certainly are--there certainly is spare capacity currently in 
the distribution system to allow, you know, me or my neighbor 
to go get an electric vehicle and plug it in and we're--and 
that'll be fine. The questions then are, you know, once that 
becomes--you know, moves from 1 percent to 50 percent of the 
market, where are the stress points? Where do those exist? And 
I have every confidence that we can expand the grid and adjust 
the grid to manage that.
     I think also required is the interaction between, you 
know, advance control aspects because, for example, you know, 
do you really want to be charging electric vehicles if there's 
a person next door that doesn't have electricity to their house 
because there's not enough supply, right? We have to be able to 
price and value the different uses of electricity, and we need 
the systems and software and techniques to be able to balance 
that.
     Ms. Stevens. Yes, thank you. And let's also just talk--you 
know I've got a minute and a half left. Let's just also talk 
about--and I'm sure my other colleagues are going to get into 
this--but the designing of a cleaner grid. So in a recent New 
York Times article, you know, they're obviously reflecting on 
1/3 of America's greenhouse gas emissions are accounted for by 
transportation. You know, each year the electric cars and 
trucks are widely seen as a crucial part of the solution to 
climate change. It would also help if the electric grid that 
fueled these vehicles got a lot cleaner. Who has some thoughts 
about that and some of the ways in which we could make our 
electric grid cleaner?
     Dr. Jenkins. Representative Stevens, I could answer that 
question. Thank you.
     Ms. Stevens. Yes, thank you.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, over the next 10 years it would be 
possible if we continue to accelerate the pace of deployment of 
wind and solar, which I think we can do as these industries 
scale up, to increase the contribution of wind and solar from 
about 10 percent of our electricity today to as much as half by 
2030. That would significantly help--that would help 
significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the 
electricity sector, which is the No. 2 total source of 
emissions today, about 1/4 of our greenhouse gas emissions, by 
reducing the use of coal-fired and natural gas generation even 
if we keep the natural gas capacity around as a firm generation 
source.
     And so we can reduce emissions probably on the order of 70 
to 80 percent over the next decade in the electricity sector by 
scaling up technologies that are affordable and ready to go 
today. And we can use that same decade to proactively invest in 
the clean firm generation technologies that will ultimately 
need to replace or retrofit our existing natural gas fleet. If 
we do that, the power sector can help decarbonize 
transportation as well, as you noted, through electric 
vehicles, as well as heating through heat pumps.
     Ms. Stevens. Great, thank you so much. I yield back.
     Staff. Ms. Bice is next.
     Ms. Bice. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to all the 
witnesses this morning.
     This first question quickly is directed at Ms. Garza. You 
mentioned earlier that forecasting is based on a 10-year 
lookback. Can you expand on that? Because that seems really 
unbelievable to me.
     Ms. Garza. So the weather conditions, using--so I'll be 
upfront and say as a utility industry--and I consider myself 
part of that--we're not the most creative folks, and so all we 
know to do is to--is what we have experienced. And when ERCOT 
looks at their--looked at their seasonal forecast, even their 
extreme weather forecast or the demand resulting from extreme 
weather for this winter, all they had in their records was the 
extreme winter we had in 2011. And that's--that--we--that was a 
bad--we had rolling outages then. That was a bad situation. 
That was the most extreme we'd seen, and so that was the basis 
of an extreme forecast. And, as it turned out, we suffered 
something worse than that, so we were not fully versed or fully 
aware of what the potential could be. And so understanding that 
potential is what I'm--was what I was trying to get at.
     Ms. Bice. Thank you for clarifying that point. Mr. 
Jenkins, this question is for you. Would you be surprised to 
know that there has not been a nuclear reactor started online 
in over 30 years?
     Dr. Jenkins. No, I would not be surprised. Actually, there 
was one reactor that had been restarted the TVA (Tennessee 
Valley Authority) brought online, but yes, it's been a long 
time since we started construction or finished a project on 
time.
     Ms. Bice. So how do you think that the adoption of the 
newest technology, which is the small cell nuclear reactors, 
could actually play into the electric grid and actually address 
some of the concerns with availability of electricity on a 
large scale?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, so new small modular reactors could be a 
more affordable source of clean firm generation capacity, along 
with advanced geothermal energy, hydrogen combustion turbines 
or fuel cells, and carbon capture and sequestration on natural 
gas or coal or biomass-fired power plants. So all of those 
options, which this Committee has supported in the past on a 
bipartisan basis, can be developed proactively over the next 
decade, can be introduced into the market, made cheaper over 
time, and can ultimately help contribute to a more resilient 
and cleaner electricity system.
     Ms. Bice. I think that my point here is we've talked a lot 
about wind and solar but nobody has bothered to talk about 
nuclear. And although it's a very touchy subject, I understand 
that the dynamics of that, I think it's something we should be 
mindful of because nuclear sort of addresses some of the 
environmental issues that we see----
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes.
     Ms. Bice [continuing]. With, let's say, natural gas and 
coal. But the newest technology, which is just now coming 
around with these small nuclear reactors, actually provides an 
opportunity for us to increase capacity pretty greatly 
actually----
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes.
     Ms. Bice [continuing]. With less of an impact overall to 
anyone.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, and if I could just emphasize also there 
are research needs that could help extend the life of our 
existing nuclear fleet, which is our largest source of carbon-
free generation and a key foundation to build on going forward.
     Ms. Bice. And I'm for your deal in investing more in 
research. I'm sure this Committee on a bipartisan basis would 
also agree with that.
     My last question, we talked a lot about the challenges 
with Texas and the impact of the natural gas shutdown. This 
question is for anyone. Do you believe that the winterization 
of the natural gas delivery and production could have prevented 
the large-scale failure that we saw? I think it was a 30 
percent reduction in delivery capacity.
     Dr. Tierney. I think this is a very important issue, and 
I'm really glad you brought it up. The incentives need to work 
to make sure that the generators are arranging for gas in a 
winterized way so that the gas supply can be helpful in 
critical periods like Texas just experienced. The National 
Academies report calls for a--an effort to make the gas 
industry processing production delivery system more reliable 
and visible, along the lines of what we already have on the 
electric side, so there is a lot of work could be done there.
     Dr. Rai. I think something I can add there is in terms of 
the visibility I think there is a lot of scope in terms of how 
the production happens and how it is impacted. It is--we are 
still finding out exactly what the impact was upon production 
losses because of winterization. The general answer is yes, it 
would have helped, but there's a lot of, you know, information 
needs and visibility needs there as well.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, we----
     Ms. Bice. Yes, I'll just close--I'm sorry, go ahead.
     Dr. Jenkins. I was going to say and it goes both 
directions, so they were losses of power to compressor stations 
that are needed to keep pressure up in the gas pipelines as 
well, and so the inter-linkages of these two systems is 
critical and needs to be explored and strengthened.
     Ms. Bice. And I'll just wrap up my closing by saying that 
I think that we've learned a little bit about making sure that 
infrastructure across the United States, whether it be in Texas 
or in California, that we're keeping up with maintenance on 
that infrastructure to prevent things like huge power outages 
or wildfires from occurring because of the lack of 
infrastructure upkeep. I yield back, Madam Chair.
     Staff. Ms. Wild is next.
     Ms. Wild. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Chair, for 
convening this hearing.
     My district is one of the districts in Pennsylvania. 
Pennsylvania has long been an energy leader in our country. And 
one of the things that I really wanted to get into is 
Pennsylvania is connected to a multistate grid, PJM 
Interconnection, which moves electricity from New Jersey down 
to South Carolina--excuse me, North Carolina, and as far west 
as Illinois covering all or some of 15 States and the District 
of Columbia.
     Drs. Rai and Jenkins, I wanted to ask you, how can 
multistate and regional grids reduce the risk our grid faces 
from severe weather and other threats relative to single state 
grids? And I'll just go ahead and ask the rest of the question. 
You can cover it as you will. What benefits would multistate 
grids offer for reliability and resilience as we transition 
toward renewable energies like solar and wind?
     Dr. Rai. Thank you so much----
     Dr. Jenkins. I----
     Dr. Rai. Thank you so much for that question, Ms. Wild. 
The answers are--there's a lot of questions in there. The last 
major studies about the value of interconnecting ERCOT 
[inaudible] to the other two grids were done a couple decades 
ago or over that. There have been other studies, smaller 
studies but really not a very big, significant. Times have 
changed a lot. Technologies have changed a lot. All three grids 
have experienced increased penetration of renewables. And as 
Dr. Jenkins mentioned, that is a trend that is going to only 
grow. There is a very strong and immediate need to take a much 
more careful leap.
     It is just like, you know, how our source of natural gas 
helped us in hard times. We reach out for water, for food, for 
support. These interconnections were just the same way. If 
you're impacted differently, there is a lot of support and 
supplies that can act--that can be accessed through these 
interconnections. And it actually did happen even during this 
crisis for parts of the interconnection bringing in some power 
from the Eastern into the midcontinent region as well.
     Ms. Wild. Dr. Jenkins, did you want to add something to 
that?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes. No, I second everything that Professor 
Rai just said. Just one thing to add is that I know that Texas 
has deliberately stayed out of the Eastern interconnection or 
Western interconnection in order to maintain its independent, 
State-run electricity markets. That could continue to be 
maintained while expanding direct-current inter-ties with the 
rest of the Eastern or Western interconnect. There are some 
existing transfer capacities between the two--between the 
Eastern interconnect and Texas and between Mexico and Texas. 
Those could be extended or expanded particularly into the West, 
and to the Western interconnect as well without synchronizing 
the ERCOT grid with the rest of the system. And so there's not 
really, you know, a tension there between greater--a greater 
ability to import and export power and the independence of the 
ERCOT market. And I think that's an area that Texas should 
consider how much of that investment is worthwhile going 
forward.
     Ms. Wild. OK. Well, thank you. That's very illuminating. I 
also wanted to focus on storage a little bit, which is one of 
the issues that energy sector executives in my district talk 
about all the time in connection with clean energy transition, 
the need for scalable, efficient, and affordable energy storage 
so that our grid will stay reliable. How would that kind of 
energy storage capacity have lessened the impact of the extreme 
weather in Texas?
     And my follow-up is what research questions should the 
scientific community and DOE investigate to ensure that energy 
storage capacity is resilient?
     Dr. Jenkins. So I would say that the bulk of the energy 
storage capacity we are adding to the grid today are lithium-
ion batteries, the same kind of battery storage in electric 
vehicles. Those are very affordable and getting cheaper every 
year and provide a lot of flexibility on short timescales over 
the course of a few hours.
     Unfortunately, in this crisis if Texas had more battery 
storage capacity, it would've helped at the beginning of the 
crisis, but those batteries would have run out of power on 
Monday and, you know, not provided much more beyond that.
     So in terms of research needs, you know, there are other 
reliability and resiliency threats the shorter-duration 
batteries can help with other than these sustained outages and 
also longer-duration energy storage technologies that could 
provide sustained output for days or even weeks could 
potentially play a larger role in these sorts of events.
     But ultimately, you know, long events like this require 
firm generation capacity that can sustain its output without an 
energy limitation that storage has.
     Ms. Wild. Thank you. And, Dr. Rai, did you want to add 
anything to that in my last 15 seconds?
     Dr. Rai. Just very quickly that there is a very important 
need to also look at large-scale demand-side engagement and how 
that can be engaged even for longer durations because that's a 
very tough nut to crack with storage for a long time.
     Ms. Wild. Thank you so much. With that, I yield back, 
Madam Chair.
     Staff. Mr. Feenstra is next. We can't hear you, Mr. 
Feenstra. It looks like you have a headset connected.
     Staff. Mr. Feenstra, next to where you can mute and 
unmute, there's a little triangle or you can click on that and 
check and see what audio devices you are using. Still cannot 
hear you. No, sir, still cannot hear you.
     Mr. Feenstra. Can you hear me now?
     Staff. We can hear you.
     Mr. Feenstra. Sorry about that. I just wanted to say thank 
you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member Lucas. Before I start, I 
just wanted to thank each of the witnesses for their testimony 
and sharing their extensive research and educated opinions with 
us.
     You know, the weather this February in Iowa, you know, we 
saw a lot of the drastic things. Our temperatures dropped below 
28 below 0. We had 24 inches of snow. Part of my district, yes, 
we saw rolling blackouts and it was a pretty big deal. It's 
important that we all do what we can to protect and modernize 
the grid that we have to ensure the resiliency and protect from 
these large-scale rolling blackouts.
     So the question is for Dr. Jenkins. You highlighted the 
importance of clean electricity to an affordable transition to 
a net zero emissions economy in your testimony. My district in 
Iowa is one of the top wind energy areas in the country. New 
wind and solar generation is in our region but is tremendously 
bottlenecked by the transmission constraints. Mason City, a 
town in my district, will be the home to one of the two power 
converter stations for an organization called the SOO Green 
HVDC (high-voltage direct current) Link transmission line. This 
line will power renewable energy from Iowa into northern 
Illinois with--being connected with a PJM power market.
     So this is my question. How do we create transmission 
lines like this that create redundancy and increase clean 
energy availability and transport this energy to densely 
populated regions like the East Coast and Chicago and things 
like that? We're trying to do this in Iowa, but again, we have 
a tremendous bottlenecked that is going on with our 
transmission.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, as you know in Iowa and across much of 
the country we have an incredible American resource in the form 
of wind power, as well as solar energy potential across much of 
the country, but to use that effectively, we have to be able to 
bring that energy from where it's generated to where we consume 
it. It's much the same as with our natural gas and oil 
resources in the country or our coal resources where we have to 
build the natural gas pipelines and the rail lines to bring, 
you know, natural gas and coal to where we need it.
     And so a modern transmission system that is built to 
export wind and solar power from where it's cheapest to our 
cities is a critical piece of an affordable and more resilient 
electricity system that will benefit economically those 
exporting regions.
     And there are research needs as well that could help us 
improve the cost of direct-current transmission lines, the 
converter stations and other components of those systems, as 
well as identify cheaper ways to underground lines, which could 
help reduce public opposition to expansion.
     So it's a--maybe I'll defer to Ms. Tierney for more on the 
regulatory side of things, but there are significant research 
questions there for us to think about as well.
     Mr. Feenstra. And that's a great point. I mean, this line 
is an underground line running adjacent to the railroad 
system----
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes.
     Mr. Feenstra [continuing]. So it's a perfect line, secure 
and everything like that. I'm going to ask any one of you. I 
mean, what incentives would you look at it to try to create 
private-sector dollars to create these transmission lines?
     Dr. Tierney. Could I start by saying that in most 
instances it's not financial incentives that are the problem 
with bottlenecking the lines. It is really related to ensuring 
that there is public participation in the process and ensuring 
that there are regional issues that are taken into 
consideration in the siting of new transmission lines.
     The National Academies report has requested that Congress 
enact and declare a new national transmission policy that not 
just is about resiliency and reliability but it's also about 
opening up regions of the country with very high-quality wind 
resources, for example, and that that is something that should 
be taken into consideration when States and the Federal 
Government are acting to approve lines.
     The SOO line is pretty amazing in terms of how it was 
developed and sited, and I think it's a great example of the 
kinds that we should see in the future.
     Dr. Rai. Mr. Feenstra, if I could add quickly, one of the 
great examples of infrastructure investments in Texas has been 
bringing much of the wind that is generated in the western side 
of Texas into the load centers much to the south and the east, 
and that was done over a period of about a decade with over $7 
billion of investment. And that required as--just as, you know, 
Sue mentioned, a lot of public participation, as well as a very 
long and detailed regulatory process to get into that. But it 
was done and it has played a tremendous role in diversification 
of the energy system here in Texas and will be important in the 
future as well.
     Mr. Feenstra. Yes, thank you for both of your comments on 
that. I absolutely agree. I think the other big issue is a 
regulatory issue with SOO Energy and these organizations that 
are trying to do transmission lines. They're really struggling. 
It takes years to get regulatory approvals on these things, and 
if we could turn down that timeline, that would be fantastic. 
Thank you, and I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Bowman is next.
     Mr. Bowman. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member 
Lucas, and thank you to our witnesses.
     Dr. Rai, you emphasized a need for better communication 
and coordination in events like what happened in Texas and the 
need to organize a voluntary reduction of demand. When it comes 
to threats to the grid and energy shortages, do you have 
additional thoughts on how we can design emergency preparedness 
efforts so that they are truly community-driven and equitable? 
Are there any precedents for how this can work well that you 
have in mind while crafting your testimony?
     Dr. Rai. That's a great question, Mr. Bowman. I would like 
to just remind as--I was, you know, with my family during the 
crisis, and it was in utter chaos after a couple days in the 
household. Literally--and there was very little coordinated 
information that was coming to us. We were banking on neighbors 
and, you know, other friends for any little bit of information 
other than high-level system information.
     When--in times of--there is a lot of precedents. For 
example, in times of major hurricanes, there is a lot of great 
work that has happened in this country over the last several 
decades. There is a lot of great infrastructure and significant 
investment that goes on into weather forecasting and emergency 
system preparation. When ahead of time information is shared, 
then people pair up, people get ready and leave, get to safety.
     It does tie back to security concerns and in particular 
that is an added complexity in the electricity system. If an 
event like this further gets complicated, as was mentioned by 
Dr. Torres, that in events like this further in the restart 
process, in the black start process you have additional 
cybersecurity-related threats, that can really complicate 
matters a lot. So, you know, I would say when multiple events 
can really get out of control, really focusing on those events 
and crafting solutions that take those matters into 
consideration.
     Dr. Jenkins. Could I just add to that briefly----
     Dr. Tierney. Well, on the equity question----
     Dr. Jenkins. Sorry, go ahead, Sue.
     Mr. Bowman. Please.
     Dr. Tierney. Well, on the equity question there are things 
that utilities are doing around the country in vulnerable areas 
where there are disadvantaged populations. There are 
prepositioning of community heating or cooling centers where 
there's--that that will remain connected to the grid as a 
critical service area. There are prepositioning of crews to 
help with addressing restoration of service. And those are all 
part of a resilient grid, you know, planning and getting it 
ready for when you need it, and that's really important for 
folks who just really need electricity for heating and cooling.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, I was just going to echo that, that it's 
not just the resilience of the system but also our preparedness 
to respond when accidents and crises do strike that leads to 
the human cost of these crises, and so anticipating these kinds 
of extreme weather events and better preparing for them, 
particularly with a focus on the most vulnerable populations, 
can make a huge difference in the--you know, the economic and 
physical human toll of these kinds of events.
     Dr. Rai. Mr. Bowman, very quickly, one other point----
     Mr. Bowman. Yes.
     Dr. Rai [continuing]. Of the story is how much local 
community and local leaders got together and really got the 
State and our communities through this. It was one of the 
biggest, most powerful untold stories, but the truth is that in 
events like this, which might actually get more frequent, we 
cannot let it down to the households and the communities to 
always fend for themselves. There is need for Federal and State 
action at a very high level.
     Mr. Bowman. OK. Thank you all very much for those answers. 
I yield back my time.
     Staff. Mr. Obernolte is next.
     Mr. Obernolte. Well thank you very much to our panelists. 
This has been a fascinating discussion. My first question is 
for Dr. Jenkins. You said something in your testimony that I 
found very interesting. You attributed a lot of these failures 
to a failure to require contingency plans, and you said some 
interesting things about risk when you draw an analogy with 
insurance policies. So I wanted to ask you about that risk, 
because, in my home State of California, one of the risks to 
power generation is earthquakes, and what you quickly find is 
there is no way to completely insulate power generation from 
that risk. You know, you have to accept that a certain severity 
of earthquake is the one that you're planning for, and that, 
you know, that anything beyond that is going to affect your 
resiliency. And so I'm wondering, you know, how do we parse 
this risk? I mean, at what point do we say that we want our 
grid to be 99.99 percent resilient, but not .999 percent 
resilient because it would be too expensive? How do we do the 
math on that?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, I do think it's a challenging equation, 
and the threats that each region faces are going to be 
different, and that's one of the things I tried to emphasize in 
the testimony. So for Texas it might be these extreme cold 
events, but elsewhere it's wildfires, or earthquakes. So I'd 
say there's two things. One is to think about the relatively 
cost-effective measures that can be taken to push back that 
failure mode, so that it's a little bit stronger earthquake 
before things go down, or a little bit colder temperatures 
before the system fails, and there are a number of these 
measures that are quite affordable. You know, winterization of 
wind turbines, for example, heat tracing of critical sensors 
and feed pipes, for example, as resilience to cold, that 
could've been taken in Texas, indeed were pointed at in 
previous reports, and in many cases were just not taken or not 
maintained.
     And so there are some--first some affordable things that 
can be done to push back the breaking point. And then the 
second thing, which I think we're emphasizing in the response 
to Congressman Bowman's question, is that we also need to think 
about how we respond, and I think in earthquakes that's, you 
know, something California is well prepared for, right? The--
you do know that earthquakes are a risk, and there are 
emergency and contingency plans in place. And I think what 
climate change means is that we have to check our blind spots 
on those kinds of, you know, weather-related risks because, you 
know, if the 2011 storm in Texas was used as the high water 
mark for, you know, for the threat, and the reality was that 
that was inadequate to plan for the severity of, you know, what 
could've been possible.
     So that's where future climate research that could 
better--help us better understand how those extreme threats are 
evolving, and what steps could be taken to better prepare for 
them would be very helpful, because the past----
     Mr. Obernolte. Sure.
     Dr. Jenkins [continuing]. As I said, is not a good guide 
for the future anymore.
     Mr. Obernolte. Right. Well, I think your point is that 
there were steps that could and should have been taken in Texas 
that were reasonably cost-effective, but I think everyone needs 
to realize that a 100 percent resilient grid is statistically 
impossible, and at----
     Dr. Jenkins. Exactly, yeah.
     Mr. Obernolte [continuing]. Some point you're going to get 
to a level where the additional cost is not worth the reduction 
in risk. So----
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. And----
     Mr. Obernolte [continuing]. There's always going to be a 
point at which, you know, the grid could statistically fail.
     Dr. Jenkins. That's right, and that's why I'm--in the 
response side of things too, because it's a question of cost 
and the, you know, the risk your mitigating, and if you can use 
operational strategies and responses to these crises when 
they--when systems do fail to minimize the cost, then that also 
means you're less vulnerable as well, so it's both sides of the 
equation that we have to pay attention to.
     Mr. Obernolte. Right. Thank----
     Dr. Rai. Mr.--if I may add a couple points here? I would 
just want to remind that there were three major things that 
could have been done that did not really require a massive, you 
know, long-term investment or rethinking. I mean, I had already 
pointed out--you know. Winterization does also include engaging 
with demand, as well as, you know, very simple things, as, you 
know, what really is your critical load, right? Keeping track 
would have been very simple.
     Something I think is very important to keep in mind, as I 
mentioned in my testimony, the scale of the damages, right? You 
know, we cannot just look at, you know, what was, you know, 
what was the value of the loss to--there are damages to water 
infrastructure, there are economic damages, there are 
governments, you know, local governments failing, and when you 
bring those things in, early estimates are putting that over 
$100 billion, and my back of the envelope calculations say even 
if you were to require winterization of the entire gas and 
power infrastructure, it is not going to be of the same state. 
It's going to be an order of magnitude lower, right? So, you 
know, you need to keep both sides of the equation in mind to 
really find out what the balance is.
     Mr. Obernolte. Sure, yeah. I think we all can agree on 
that. And, Dr. Rai, while I've got you here, let me ask a last 
question. You said something in your testimony I thought was 
very interesting, which was that one of the biggest failures, 
in your opinion, was a lack of voluntary demand reduction. And 
I just wanted to ask, you know, how we would go about affecting 
voluntary demand reduction, because the traditional way is to 
do it through market pricing, which happened in some parts of 
Texas. And I think in retrospect we look at that and realize 
that it was too quick, people didn't realize the high price 
that they were paying for power, and that probably that's not a 
good way of going about it in the future. So how should we go 
about it?
     Dr. Rai. That's a great question. Voluntary reduction 
doesn't mean it should be free, you know, it--just that, you 
know, it was not--you can't enforce it, but when there are 
disruptions of this scale--and just as you mentioned, you 
cannot completely 100 percent proof things, so we should be 
expecting disruptions like this here and elsewhere. In those 
types of situation, really engaging in messaging, and engaging 
that demand becomes very important. And I have offered--I don't 
pretend to have all the solutions, but that's so important, 
such a big possible part of the question, that it needs to be 
studied further.
     Mr. Obernolte. Yeah. Well, in other parts of the country 
we have voluntary reduction programs where, in return for a 
lower electric rate, large industrial consumers agree to, on 
demand, reduce their consumption, right? But I don't think that 
that is on a scale that would be big enough to solve the 
problem in Texas. So, it's something that certainly bears 
further discussion, because I don't see how we get from where 
we are to where we want to be.
     Dr. Tierney. And much more social science research.
     Ms. Garza [continuing]. In on that. I'm sorry, Sue. If I 
could chime in on that, you know, ERCOT is a summer-focused 
electric system, and we do have significant demand programs 
reacting and responsive to the--in the summertime. And one of 
the limitations was the, you know, the limitations of those 
programs and those services, their availability in the winter, 
so----
     Mr. Obernolte. Well, great. Well, I see we're out of time, 
but thank you very much for your testimony. It's been a 
fascinating discussion. I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Casten is next.
     Mr. Casten. Thank you, Madam Chair, and it's so nice to 
see so many old friends on this panel from my prior life in the 
energy world. Want to start with a couple questions for Dr. 
Jenkins, a couple short ones, and one sort of medium one. First 
one, El Paso had about the same weather. Did they have any 
outages in this recent period?
     Dr. Jenkins. I don't believe there were any rolling 
blackouts, but I could be wrong about that.
     Mr. Casten. Is there a simple reason for that?
     Dr. Jenkins. Well, I'm not sure it's a purely simple 
reason, but they are connected to the rest of the Western 
Interconnect, and so they could draw power from much further 
away, and conditions were not quite so cold.
     Mr. Casten. So they're outside of ERCOT?
     Dr. Jenkins.  Yeah. They also, I think, took more 
proactive steps to weatherize their system, and I understand 
it.
     Mr. Casten. So, to that point, I'd like to ask unanimous 
consent to introduce a document for the record. It's entitled 
``Outages And Curtailments During The Southwest Cold Event Of 
February 1 Through 5, 2011'' from FERC and NERC. Dr. Jenkins, 
are you familiar with this report?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, I am.
     Mr. Casten. It strikes me that some of their 
recommendations talking about what should have happened in 
1989, and weren't done in 2011 and is it safe to characterize 
this report as saying that the events that recently happened in 
Texas were not only foreseeable, but were actually foreseen?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yes, I think that's correct. You could almost 
do a find and replace for the dates in the 2011 study and 
replace 1989 with 2011, and 2011 with 2021, and it would still 
read, you know, very similar to the reports that I'm sure will 
be released after this event. It's kind of eerie.
     Mr. Casten. Well, I raise that because I really want to 
impress on my colleagues to please read this report, because 
there is an understandable political bias for everybody to say 
we couldn't have seen this coming, and we did, and we need to 
make sure that we incorporate those recommendations.
     Somewhat meatier question for you, and I do want to get 
one question for Dr. Tierney, so I apologize--brief here, the 
North American Reliability Council imposes all sorts of 
requirements on load serving entities on the electric grid that 
have--requirements for backup generation, and redundant 
transmission, and one in--1 day in 10 years outage 
requirements, you know, all those details. Is there an 
equivalent standard for natural gas infrastructure?
     Dr. Jenkins. Not that I'm aware of, but I'd defer to the 
other panelists if they know more.
     Mr. Casten. Well----
     Dr. Tierney. No, there is no such reliability organization 
or standard for the gas industry.
     Mr. Casten. So as we get to grids that are more gas 
dependent, should we be thinking about something like a 
standard like that for the gas industry? Because it strikes me 
that that's the weak point in our system. And, Dr. Tierney, I 
have a follow-up question for you, but since you jumped in, go 
ahead.
     Dr. Tierney. Yeah. I want to make sure to highlight the 
recommendation of the 2021 National Academies study on the 
future of the grid, where we call for Congress to do exactly 
that. So it's a very important thing, given this 
interdependency between the two energy systems.
     Mr. Casten. So I want to pivot there, and, Dr. Tierney, 
I'm glad you jumped in, because, as a fellow former New 
Englander, the--I've always thought of ERCOT as being the New 
England ISO with less interconnect and more electric heating, 
as far as the dynamics that affect it. And, you know, I mention 
that because we have these issues where, when systems get 
tight, gas is preferentially dispatched for heating, as it was, 
except that in New England there isn't this huge surge of 
electric heating load that comes on.
     And as we think about how to do what we must do to get to 
a zero carbon future, we've got a national policy that broadly 
talks about let's get to zero carbon in the electric sector as 
soon as we can, and then let's ``electrify everything.'' And 
Texas is in many ways sort of a microcosm, if not all the way 
down that path, but the beginning of it, because loads that are 
done--that are served with other fuels in the rest of the grid 
are significantly served with electricity in Texas, and we've 
got that constraint on the system.
     As we talk about an infrastructure while going forward, 
the--given as the, you know, if my math is right, you know, 
roughly--a little less than 40 percent of the total energy 
used--this country for electricity, almost 50 percent is for 
heating, in the industrial--commercial industrial sector. If we 
are going to electrify everything, and we are going to shift to 
a zero carbon electric grid, the implication is that we are 
massively increasing our generation fleet, we are massively 
relocating the generation fleet, and we're massively relocating 
where the load is, and we'd better be talking about 
transmission.
     So what should we be thinking about--this--set aside who 
pays. What is the quantum of money we need to be thinking 
about, round to the nearest $10 billion if you need to, to 
invest in a transmission system that is actually going to 
enable us to connect clean generation to an electrified load?
     Dr. Tierney. I don't have my number at my fingertips, but 
I would be happy to provide you with information after the 
hearing, if that would be helpful. I completely agree with you 
that transmission plays an absolutely critical role here. We 
know from many NREL studies, where Dr. Torres is located, that 
bigger regions interconnected, and transmission-enabling those 
bigger regions to perform, is really important. Where you are 
living today, there are these various interconnections across 
different regional transmission organizations. Those need to be 
bulked up, and certainly New England is interested in enhancing 
its transmission capability to a variety of diverse areas where 
there are high quality--in a stimulus package there can be 
things that Congress would adopt as part of financial 
incentives to get shovels, or, let's see, electrical wires put 
in place on the system.
     Dr. Jenkins. If I could add to that, Representative 
Casten, the Net Zero America study that I helped publish at 
Princeton, which looked at this transition over the next decade 
toward a net zero emissions economy, estimated on the order of 
$350 billion in incremental investment in transmission over the 
next decade alone. That'd be about a 60 percent increase in 
transmission capacity over the next 10 years. This is a huge 
undertaking, a huge opportunity for investment and job creation 
as part of an infrastructure package.
     Mr. Casten. All right. I'd love to follow up with all of 
you. I'm out of time, but I do just want to leave this to 
comment here that the scale of what we are talking about in 
transmission in our infrastructure plan is a tiny, tiny, tiny 
fraction of that, and we don't start to grapple with the 
numbers you're talking about, we're going to be wrong-footed. 
So let's continue the conversation. Thank you, and I yield 
back.
     Mr. Torres. Mr. Casten, if I could just throw something in 
there? There's a set of electrification future studies that 
we've been conducting with the Department of Energy that really 
helped you--helps us understand how the loads will grow across 
the different sectors, and that would be very useful in the 
planning. Thank you.
     Mr. Casten. Thank you.
     Staff. Mr. Garcia is next.
     Mr. Garcia. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you, Madam 
Chairwoman, and Ranking Member Lucas, for pulling this 
together, and thanks to the witnesses. This is an absolutely 
critical discussion, and what we saw in Texas last month was a 
tragedy. It was heartbreaking, and, in my opinion, was 
something that we, as Americans, should have been able to 
prevent.
     I represent a district in Southern California that these 
types of scenarios are not foreign to us, unfortunately. It's 
not necessarily the extreme cold, but in our case it's the 
extreme heat, and it's the winds, that have led to, in my 
district, close to 30 power outages in the last--call it 10 
months. We don't live in Venezuela. We live in the United 
States of America, yet our utilities behave, and the public 
utility companies responsible for power generation in our 
State, behave as if it is Venezuela. These problems are a 
product of challenges provided by Mother Nature, but it is 
mankind, and the folks responsible for our utility companies, 
and those who represent us in government, who are responsible 
for the failure. We have failed to overcome the challenges that 
Mother Nature has provided, and I resonate with the comments by 
my colleague, Mr. Casten, that this is a repeated lesson 
learned over the last several decades.
     In my district we lose power when the winds get above 30 
miles per hour. That's not a scenario that one would call a 
force majeure. That's not an anomaly, especially not in 
Southern California. That happens on a very frequent basis. 
We've lost lives, we've risked thousands of lives, we've been 
surrounded by flames while we have no power, and we've been 
effectively not only losing our power, but also our water, 
because many of my constituents are on wells that are 
electrically driven.
     So my question to the panel, and I think we can start with 
Mr. Torres, is how do we ensure that we're not playing whack-a-
mole here across all 50 States and our territories? How do we 
ensure that what we saw in Texas doesn't happen in other 
States? Maybe not for the same reasons, maybe for different 
reasons, and that these lessons learned that you are collecting 
as a result of the incidents in February in Texas are being 
disseminated? And it may not be for cold weather, but this grid 
hardening and the lessons learned, what venues, what media 
forum, summits, and/or discussions are you having to make sure 
that the lessons learned from Texas, California, and other 
States are being applied to the rest of the United States so 
that we're not playing whack-a-mole here indefinitely?
     Mr. Torres. All right, thank you, Mr. Garcia. I can't 
speak to all the things that are going on. I can talk to some 
of the things that we've been doing within--in realm of the 
Department of the Energy through the GMI activities and grid 
modernization--those are strong collaborations across the 
industry with the utilities, with the vendors, the various 
stakeholders. And I fully agree with you that we really have a 
patchwork of perspectives and policies across the different 
elements of the grid, and there needs to be more communication, 
discussion, as to what are the roles, responsibilities, and the 
implications of those differences? Because we're all trying to 
achieve a common good here. We all want our lights to stay on. 
We want to avoid major events like this, and so we need to 
understand what should each part be for every member? What can 
we be doing? And what are the changes that we're--that the 
different participants are implying? How could that affect the 
overall resilience of the grid? And can there be opportunities 
for shared costs, shared investments? Those kinds of 
discussions I totally agree need to continue so that we can 
avoid and mitigate some of these kinds of disasters.
     Mr. Garcia. Thank you, sir, and I would just submit to 
this body, and all of us at the Federal level, that our 
investments in research into the grid hardening and expansion 
efforts should include not only the conduits of power between 
cities and generation plants, but also conduits between 
entities and bureaucrats who are responsible for making sure 
lessons learned are proliferated as well.
     I personally believe that we need to hold the public 
utility companies accountable for this. This is negligence. 
This is loss of life. This was foreseeable in many cases, and 
we as Americans deserve better than this. I thank, again, the 
Chairwoman for opening the aperture on this a little bit 
further, and I just want to reinforce to my colleagues that 
this is not a problem unique to Texas. We will lose more 
Americans in other States as we start seeing some of these 
incidents expand across the Nation. I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Foster is next.
     Mr. Foster. Well, thank you, and first, to my colleagues 
from Texas and to some of our witnesses, I feel your pain, as I 
too had a daughter and son-in-law trapped in Austin, and living 
off their automobile battery for days. And I'd like to mention 
their No. 1 recommendation, which is that everyone in Texas be 
given at least a rudimentary understanding on how to drive a 
car on roads after a snow or ice storm. OK, not the subject of 
our hearing, but an important point.
     Now, Mr. Torres and Mr. Jenkins, you mentioned a number of 
threats to grid reliability, including weather, EMP, wildfires, 
and others. Many of these can be ameliorated by undergrounding 
the utilities, an approach which carries multiple secondary 
benefits like eliminating eyesores, improving real estate 
property values, you know, preventing wildfires, and so on. So 
what are the promising directions of Federal R&D into lowering 
the cost of undergrounding utilities? You know, I'm thinking 
of, like, swarms of robots that toil away underground to bury 
utilities, both in urban and rural areas, or just simply lower 
cost conductor/insulator power conversion strategies for high 
voltage DC lines, and so on.
     You know, are there specific programs that have been 
defined for--that could absorb increase Federal funding for 
this research, you know, given that industry is pretty 
conservative in what it's willing to invest in? You know, what 
would an underground power transmission moon shot look like? So 
any one of you want to take a stab at that?
     Mr. Torres. I can't say that I'm an expert on underground 
DC systems. One of the biggest challenges is the access in the 
siting to that. There definitely can be further investments to 
advance the various technologies, to improve on that, to 
improve on the conductor materials, and so on. There also can 
be done things at a local level. You know, the--underground 
lines can, you know, appear at the transmission and 
distribution level as well. There are places where flooding 
could be an issue. So you really need to understand where this 
kind of technology makes sense as well, and if it will actually 
resolve the issue, and weigh out the costs overall.
     But I believe in looking at a portfolio of options, 
including DC lines, including undergrounding, including 
microgrids. So I think we're at a point in the evolution of 
technology, and research, and information here that we have 
many more possibilities, so I would just caution that we not 
select just one particular pathway.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, maybe just one thing to add for the 
Committee is to understand that direct current lines are a 
little bit like the--getting on the highway, where you can only 
get on and off at certain on and off ramps, and those are the 
DC--you know, AC to DC converter stations, that we need to hook 
up these lines to our synchronized AC grid. And there are 
significant opportunities for innovation in cost reductions in 
those converter stations which could allow us to make better 
use of HVDC lines embedded within our broader AC transmission 
system, so I think that is an area for research that could be, 
you know, increased funding could go a long way.
     Mr. Foster. Yeah. Well, if there had been specific plans 
made for, you know, a program that could absorb significant--
larger funding, and, you know, cost production research, 
basically, because it seems like a big part of that technology 
has really not changed in the 1960's. And I think, you know, if 
you look for example, at the cost production in microwaves, you 
know, we bought a microwave oven, which is, you know, a 
magnetron in a metal box with a timer, and that's, you know, a 
drop from $250 of 1960 dollars to about $42 today, you know, 
not through revolutionary technology, but simply step by step 
cost reduction, and I think that that's really an area where we 
could benefit from investment.
     And if in a moment I can have an estimate of my time left 
from the staff, I would--it would be useful.
     Staff. 1 minute, Mr. Foster.
     Mr. Foster. OK. So many of the really destructive 
scenarios to the grid, you know, whether they're cyber attacks 
or accidental, have to do with messing around with 
synchronizing the phase or frequency of the AC generation and 
distribution systems. You know, in contrast, DC transport 
systems, you know, can be protected by relatively simple 
systems, you know, like diode clamps, over-voltage protection, 
so on, that don't rely on software that can be corrupted, and 
can be much more easily made immune to natural and artificial 
electromagnetic pulse events and so on. Has this been looked 
at, really, the benefits in terms of disaster resilience, of 
high voltage--or DC systems generally compared to AC systems?
     Dr. Tierney. Could I answer very briefly by saying that 
there has been a lot of research on the technical and 
regulatory issues associated with HDVC--DC lines. But I think 
your question and comments really calls out for asking DOE to 
do a moon shot type road map for that kind of research that 
would really take things over the hump. As one thinks about the 
expansion of the system that is going to be required, and the 
natural resistance that people have to the visual effects of 
new power lines, I think it is a really important area of 
work----
     Mr. Foster. Thank you, my----
     Dr. Tierney [continuing]. From a scientific basis.
     Mr. Foster. Thank you. And so I will--happy to collaborate 
with any of my colleagues on brainstorming what that would look 
like. And my time is up, and I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Babin is next.
     Mr. Babin. Yes, sir, thank you so very much. Really 
appreciate you witnesses being here to talk about something 
that is so important.
     When Winter Storm Uri swept across and through Texas, 
thousands of my constituents, and millions across the State, 
found themselves in life and death circumstances, without heat, 
without water, and access to essential goods, in the coldest 
storm in modern Texas history. We must address the failures and 
subsequently support policies that make sure that this 
catastrophe never happens again. I'd also like to thank Mr. 
Foster for his suggestion, because many Texans do not know how 
to drive in these conditions, thankfully, because they're so 
very rare in the State of Texas.
     But our energy sources must be predictable, dependable, 
and affordable. Unfortunately, the national trend of increasing 
regulatory policies and green energy subsidies has led to 
States, in this case Texas, incorporating more unreliable power 
into the grid while decreasing reliance on proven and 
dependable base load energy resources. We must recognize the 
limits of energy sources such as wind and solar. If Texas had 
been on the grid that was 100 percent renewable, as many 
continue to advocate for, this weather scenario would have been 
much worse. Thankfully natural gas, which is a vital 
contributor to our Texas grid, would carry the lion's share of 
the load of this energy emergency.
     And so, Madam Chair, I ask unanimous consent to submit for 
the record a one-page fact sheet from the American Exploration 
and Production Council, which details the role of natural gas 
during this February's winter event.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Without objection.
     Mr. Babin. Thank you. So what is the solution? I firmly 
believe that market-based solutions would better ensure 
increased grid resiliency. As Pat Woods, previous FERC 
Chairman, said recently, I can assure you the competitive model 
is the better way to bring price, service, and technological 
innovation benefits to the customers.
     And so let me also briefly mention that many continue to 
say the source of the blackouts was Texas's insistence on being 
part of an independent grid, thus depriving it of ample power 
from local States and ``wise'' regulation from the Federal 
Government. But joining the Federal grid is not the solution, 
and would have far-reaching consequences, which would include 
greater market volatility, and much higher prices.
     My question to Mr. Garza, if the oil fields have attempted 
to become more green friendly, they have electrified. Should 
there be more research and development into microgrids or non-
grid electricity? Part of the reason gas couldn't get out of 
the ground during this storm was because the devices to get it 
out of the ground simply ran out of electricity. Do you believe 
that forcing these different types of energy sources to all 
become electric is the right direction to be heading in?
     Ms. Garza. Well, sir, thank you for your--thank you for 
that question. Yes, there certainly were situations where gas 
production and transportation facilities where--which are 
dependent on electricity found their electricity cutoff. And I 
would attribute that to a failure of communication, or a 
failure of understanding by the local distribution utility that 
they indeed had a critical gas production facility connected to 
their system. An example that came out during the recent 
legislative hearings here in Texas is that one of the utilities 
had about 30 gas facilities on their critical load list before 
the event, and during the event they identified 130 more. So 
clearly there's a failure of identification, and, given the 
interdependence of electricity and gas, the codependence of 
electricity and gas, we need to figure out a way to improve 
that communication and coordination.
     Mr. Babin. Thank you, ma'am. And then do you also believe 
that the current trajectory of research and development funding 
is doing enough to ensure that we achieve better grid 
resiliency?
     Ms. Garza. Well, I, you know, I always think there's more 
to do and more to learn. Clearly we, you know, we failed that 
test here in Texas, and so we need to learn from those lessons, 
and we need to figure out how those lessons can be broadly 
applied to the rest of the country. And, to me, it seems we do 
that through appropriate research and dissemination.
     Dr. Tierney. Mr. Babin?
     Mr. Babin. All right, thank you very much, and I think--
yes, ma'am?
     Dr. Tierney. I just wanted to say, clearly the National 
Academies committees on resilience of the grid and the future 
of the electric system believe that there needs to be at least 
a doubling, if not a tripling, of parts of the research chain, 
so I encourage that to your attention.
     Mr. Babin. OK. Thank you very much, and I see that I'm out 
of time, so I will yield back. Thank you, Madam Chair.
     Staff. Mr. Kildee is next.
     Mr. Kildee. Thank you. Well, first of all, thanks for 
holding this hearing. It's obviously an important hearing. I 
would like to address--and this is something that my colleague 
from Michigan, Ms. Stevens, raised, and it has to do with the 
effect of the development of electrication--electrification of 
transportation of the--of our entire fleet of vehicles over 
many decades will have on grid resilience, or what factors we 
need to consider when it comes to that inevitable development. 
And so I wonder if, Mr. Torres, if you wouldn't mind perhaps 
reiterating, because I missed part of the answer that you 
gave--or that was given when Ms. Stevens raised this issue, if 
you would mind just giving us some of the thoughts that we need 
to consider regarding grid resilience in the era of obvious 
development and movement toward electrification of vehicles?
     And then I do have an interesting question as to whether 
or not there's another side to that coin, especially when it 
comes to heavy duty vehicles, when we think about the fact 
that, in a case like this, perhaps on a smaller scale, we would 
have present on the ground, in communities, large--essentially 
batteries on wheels. Fully charged vehicles, school buses, for 
example, that might be of some utility in providing temporary 
relief in the case of, you know, of a blackout of some type. So 
if you could just touch on those two areas, I'd appreciate it.
     Mr. Torres. Yes, thank you, Mr. Kildee. So what we're 
seeing in some of the studies I mentioned, early 
electrification future studies is--there's a high potential for 
transportation to be a significant new load on the grid, and we 
see that there would probably need to be some changes on--at 
the distribution level, when--where we charge, but even 
charging management systems so not everybody would come home 
and charge at exactly the same time. Maybe people are charging 
at night, but you can do it at a different time. So all those 
kinds of things are definitely achievable with some more 
research.
     With regards to things like vehicles providing support, 
you know, it's--there's a potential with fleets, with bus 
fleets, that are maybe only driving certain times, say school 
buses, but then they sit there most of the day. During that 
time they could potentially offer some energy to the grid to 
help support it during time of need. Other, you know, light 
duty vehicles, we'd need to understand in the future, when you 
have dynamic generation locations, where are these vehicles, 
and can they plug in to some, you know, some portal where they 
could offer some support to the grid? Those kinds of things 
would still need to be looked at, business models and so on.
     But given the fact that, you know, transportation is on a 
path to at least some level of increased electrification, I 
think it offers opportunity for us to look at how it can be 
used to add grid resilience, what are the implications if we 
don't take into account the growth for light duty and heavy 
duty vehicles? Light duty vehicles at 150 kilowatt level 
charging, you know, heavy duty up to a megawatt scale charging, 
could have large impacts on the grid. At the same time, if we 
do it wisely, could also potentially add some support.
     Dr. Rai. Mr. Kildee, if I may add a couple points? The 
increasing trend in electrification for transportation 
highlights one additional interdependence. We already talked 
about how gas, electricity, and then food and water are 
connected. We are seeing another, transportation sector, 
getting--so the interdependencies are going to get more 
complicated. So that's point one. Second, your observation is 
absolutely right on. The University of Texas have had 
demonstration project that have showed that using buses and 
similar--what you mentioned, storage--you could actually 
support fire stations and similar infrastructure for certain 
durations of time, right? You know, not for very long. And the 
third piece is your comment around large vehicles. That brings 
an additional element, which is hydrogen. Especially it's very 
important for Texas, there's a lot of scope there, but it also 
adds to that diversification of, you know, energy sources, and 
supply during a, you know, critical time. So, you know, that's 
a really very promising avenue as well.
     Mr. Kildee. Well, thank you. I appreciate those comments. 
Only 2 percent right now of American vehicles are electric 
vehicles, but we know where the market is going, and we 
actually have this moment in time to prepare for that future, 
to begin to set the stage for not only greater resilience, but 
less dependency, and a cleaner environment, so this is a timely 
hearing. I thank the Chairwoman for raising it, and I 
particularly thank the panelists for really good testimony. So 
thank you, and I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. LaTurner is next.
     Mr. LaTurner. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Ranking Member 
Lucas, for holding this hearing, and I want to thank the 
panelists for being with us. Like many of its neighbors, the 
State of Kansas was hit hard by the winter storm in February. 
Subjected to sub-zero temperatures, many were without power and 
heat for days. Power and fuel sources that we rely on every day 
failed, and we weren't prepared. We cannot allow this to happen 
again. It is my hope that this hearing will shed light on 
future opportunities to strengthen and fortify our power grid 
against threats both physical and cyber, and examine how we can 
leverage our country's research and development capabilities to 
make those opportunities a reality.
     I'd like Mr. Torres and Ms. Garza to address this 
question. It's a two-part question. How interconnected are the 
various regional grids? And, while you consider that, the 
connectivity of the grids, what is the probability that an 
outage or a cyber event in one part of the country can have a 
cascading effect on the whole system?
     Mr. Torres. OK, I'll go ahead and go first. Thank you, Mr. 
LaTurner. So there are only, you know, a small set of DC ties 
interconnecting the eastern and western interconnect, and then 
there's also a tie between--I believe there's a Texas and an 
eastern interconnect. Not a lot of power flows between those 
systems at this point. They don't really depend on power flows 
going across. So, at this point, not a lot of dependency, from 
that perspective.
     The--with regards to some of the cybersecurity potential 
issues here, the potential consequences would depend on the 
type of event, where the entry was, what system was 
compromised. The grid is really made up of a whole bunch of 
small grids, there's a lot of different utilities, so, you 
know, we're always as--you know, we're as strong as our weakest 
link, so having some consistency on the expectations in 
policies, and even technologies and approaches, is really good. 
I'd say as a whole we're doing a pretty good job at the bulk 
grid level. NERC has jurisdiction over the larger utilities. 
You know, they're providing power over the bulk grid, the high 
voltage level.
     Once you get down to the distribution level, you know, 
they are doing the best they can as well. They are, you know, 
developing standards and so on, but they don't necessarily have 
the same level of resources. So finding ways to levelize and 
provide--given that, you know, potentially a connection 
anywhere can be a connection everywhere if cybersecurity is not 
managed appropriately.
     There was a--I guess the first power grid outage caused by 
a cyber attack in 2015 in Ukraine. Could that happen here? 
Don't know. We've been, you know, in my career I've been 
looking at this since the 1990's, and the grid has evolved 
considerably since. I will say that I don't believe that's 
we're paying attention--enough attention to what the threats 
are ahead, because we don't know how quickly the cyber threat 
is evolving. It's evolving very, very quickly, so we need to 
really move toward more inherently resilient systems, knowing 
that we don't always know where that next attack is coming 
from, or even what it might be, but the system would be 
resilient, be able to isolate and detect something's wrong, and 
be able to reconstruct, and get the system back up and running 
as soon as possible.
     Mr. LaTurner. I appreciate that. And, Ms. Garza, if you 
don't mind?
     Ms. Garza. Yeah, sure. From an interconnected standpoint, 
we've talked about Texas's limited direct current 
interconnections with the Eastern Interconnect, and a few with 
Mexico as well. The thing of these different grids is that they 
are operated synchronously, that is they're moving together, 
and the DC connection allows that separateness, allows those 
synchronous operations to be separated.
     If--so in this situation, if we had some more connections 
to the Eastern Interconnect, I'm not sure that that would've 
been very helpful because all of the regions around us to the 
north and to the east were suffering their own issues, as you 
just alluded to in Kansas, and all the way down into Louisiana. 
The cold weather descended across the center of the country. So 
incrementally I'm not sure there would've been much opportunity 
for improvement. If you were talking about sort of national 
bulk high capacity, the HVDC lines, you know, broadly across 
the country, yes, that might have been valuable. I'm not sure 
you could justify that expense just on a winter resilience need 
in Texas, or more locally, but there are other benefits of that 
kind of interconnection as well.
     Mr. LaTurner. Thank you both very much. I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Beyer is next.
     Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much. I'd like to start with Dr. 
Jenkins, and--with a sort of foundational existential question, 
Dr. Jenkins. Now, you're a MIT Ph.D., which I very much 
respect, so here's the question. We have this feedback loop. We 
burn fossil fuels, which are amazingly efficient, lots of BTUs 
concentrated--which leads to climate change and global warming, 
which leads to extreme events, and then we adapt to this by 
burning more fossil fuel. Does this make any sense, and is this 
not the equivalent of smashing your hand with a hammer, 
noticing that it hurts and is bleeding, so keep hammering 
harder?
     Dr. Jenkins. Well, it's a little bit--and the challenge is 
a little bit, to use a different metaphor, like trying to build 
the airplane while flying it, right? So we have to keep our 
critical infrastructures and our economy going as we transition 
as quickly and affordably as possible to a cleaner energy 
system that breaks that link. And so we can't do that 
overnight, but we can move much faster than we have 
historically, and that means both greater reliance on variable 
renewable resources, as well as cleaner firm technologies that 
can supplant fossil fuels, or could even allow us to continue 
to use fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration.
     Mr. Beyer. So, Dr. Jenkins, let me continue on this theme. 
And I know you're not a regulator, you're a scientist, but 
Governor Abbott said in a statement yesterday that he'd asked 
for and accepted the head of the PUC's, the Public Utility 
Commission's, resignation, and this was after the Texas Monthly 
reported that he had told out of state investors, think Wall 
Street, on a telephone call that he would work to ``throw the 
weight of the Commission behind stopping calls to reverse 
billions of dollars in overcharges for wholesale electricity 
during the storms.'' It turns out that ERCOT had forgotten to 
roll back its prices from the sky-high levels as the power came 
back on. And--independent agency originally thought it was only 
a $16 billion overcharge. They've dialed it back to $6 billion 
in overcharges. So, Dr. Jenkins, here's the thought, was ERCOT 
actually designed to protect ratepayers?
     Dr. Jenkins. Well, this is--there's a separate question, I 
think, is whether the Utility Commission of Texas was, you 
know, seeing its primary responsibility as to the people of 
Texas or to the investors in the power system. ERCOT runs the 
electricity market, but it's regulated by the Utility 
Commission of Texas, which now has no members, even to figure 
out how to, you know, navigate after this crisis. So I think it 
is a shame to see the sort of, you know, vacancy at the 
Commission now, at a time when we need regulators to be acting 
on behalf of the public.
     Mr. Beyer. Although it is encouraging to see a bipartisan 
effort to make sure that the ratepayers are protected now, 
after the fact.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah.
     Mr. Beyer. Dr. Jenkins, would Texas benefit from a 
capacity market, you know, the so-called forward markets, where 
we would pay for building capacity, not just for selling 
electricity?
     Dr. Jenkins. I think that's an important and open 
question. I think, you know, we have to be a little bit careful 
about thinking about different financial incentives alone as 
sufficient to ensure weatherization measures. You have to 
remember that a lot of the generators that went out during this 
crisis were hedged, so they were actually obligated to pay back 
the power that they couldn't generate at the market rate of 
$9,000 a megawatt hour. So they had an enormous incentive to be 
available, and suffered millions in dollars in losses when they 
weren't. So I'm not convinced that a capacity market, which 
would provide different incentives for, you know, for providing 
firm capacity, would've fundamentally changed those incentives. 
The financial incentives were pretty strong.
     What I think this was was a failure of regulation, 
honestly, to require certain measures that were cost-effective, 
and could provide broad public benefits by avoiding these sorts 
of crises for the, you know, the catastrophic impacts on the 
public writ large that are much larger than the impacts that 
any individual power plant would face. So we have a public good 
here to reliability, and I think that ultimately requires 
regulation to ensure--the benefit of a capacity market is that 
it gives you one more point of regulation, where participation 
in that capacity market, and getting payments, you know, long-
term payments for capacity could be contingent on compliance 
with certain regulations regarding weatherization, and we've 
seen those kinds of steps taken in other markets, like New 
England, where they require either firm gas contracts, or dual 
fuel capacity for, you know, gas plants that can switch over to 
oil. So that--it would be another point of regulation, but I 
don't think changing the financial incentives alone would be 
sufficient.
     Mr. Beyer. Would capacity markets have any role in 
encouraging the diversification of the energy sources?
     Dr. Jenkins. Not necessarily. Capacity markets don't 
necessarily lead to greater diversity. In fact, they primarily 
benefit natural gas power generators in their current design. 
We have to think carefully about how we design these long run 
incentives. They're ostensibly technology neutral, but as Jacob 
Mays, and Dick O'Neil at FERC, and others have shown, the 
specific single contract that they offer is well-aligned with 
the risk profile of gas generators, and other generators face 
different risks, and so we need more long-term products to 
address the different risk profiles that they each face in 
order to ensure more diversity.
     Mr. Beyer. Great. Thank you very much. I yield back.
     Staff. Ms. Kim is next.
     Ms. Kim. Thank you. Thank you, Ranking Member, and 
Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this hearing today. You know, 
unfortunately, my home State of California heavily relies on 
imported power from other States to help field electricity 
demand. According to the Wall Street Journal article from 
August 2020, California's grid operator must find 10,000 to 
15,000 megawatts replacement power during a period where 
generation of solar and wind power falls off. The combination 
of wildfires, and increased demand due to the COVID-19 
pandemic, and rising temperatures were a perfect storm, causing 
power outages in California last summer. And, regrettably, 
our--as our State looks to purchase more energy from other 
States and abroad, California plans to shut down the Diablo 
Canyon power plant at a time when we need a good mix of energy 
sources.
     So I would like to pose the question to all witnesses--
grid scale storage will be a key technology driver for security 
and resiliency as new energy sources are incorporated into the 
U.S. power grid. So I would like to hear from each of you your 
perspectives, are there areas of this research that are better 
off left to the private industry?
     Dr. Jenkins. If I could begin, maybe? I think that the 
history of American innovation around particularly energy 
technologies is one of active public and private partnership. 
So the innovation often occurs from private sector businesses, 
but they're critically supported throughout the entire 
evolution of that technology by investment on behalf of the 
public in R&D, in demonstration, in early market opportunities 
in the forms of procurement, or tax credits, or standards that 
drive technology. And all of those together help provide the 
innovative opportunity for the private sector to develop these 
new technologies. So it's really partnership, and it's one that 
America excels at, and it's got us cheap wind and solar power, 
electric vehicle batteries, LEDs (light-emitting diodes), 
hydraulic fracturing, you know, for--and horizontal drilling, 
all kinds of technologies that are more than paying off the, 
you know, the investment that the public has made in those 
technologies.
     Ms. Kim. Great. Anyone want to chime in too?
     Dr. Tierney. Yes, please. Representative Kim, I'm--I was 
raised near you, in Redlands, California, and went to school at 
the Claremont Colleges, so it's--I know your district well. And 
one of the things that complements what Professor Jenkins just 
said, with regard to the important role that the Federal 
Government plays in supporting basic science and applied 
science on storage, among other things, is the kinds of things 
that have been done in Southern California to have really a 
demand pull associated with storage technologies, and moving 
those into the markets. So those two things in conjunction with 
each other are really part of the innovation cycle that can 
pull resources into the market and lower costs over time. So I 
think there's a lot to learn from California's experience on 
this.
     Ms. Kim. Thank you. I would like to thank Dr. Jenkins and 
Dr. Tierney for your responses. Let me get onto the second 
question. How does transitioning to the smart grid, or adding 
Internet of Things capabilities to industry or control systems 
influence security and resiliency in the energy sector? How 
should we think about incorporating new technologies, like 
artificial intelligence, or the Internet of Things, in 
developing more efficient battery storage units?
     Dr. Tierney. We really need to set better standards for 
assuring grid security protocols related to cyber and other 
issues, because all of those Internet of Things could have the 
opportunity to create intrusions into the grid's performance. 
So there's regulatory in the form of standard-setting that are 
uniform around the country, but there's really a tremendous 
amount of R&D that would be subject to your Committee's 
jurisdiction associated with simulation tools that provide 
different angles on how there are the interactions between 
Internet of Things devices and local grid operations. There's a 
long list of things that I've included in my testimony that 
would address the kinds of things that you're talking about.
     Dr. Rai. If I might add, Ms. Kim, very quickly, there is a 
flip side to it. As we talked about, smart devices, smart 
devices, smart meters, could have really helped a lot in terms 
of very smartly cycling non-critical load, which actually was 
frozen, and so there were, you know, large parts of the 
population without power for several days, as well as in terms 
of predictive capability. You mentioned artificial 
intelligence. There is a lot of that could be brought to really 
get a look ahead. And the final point I want to make is, you 
know, we do want to separate this event from what can be 
managed through even grid scale storage. You know, this was an 
event that lasted for 3 days, and, you know, 7 days in many 
parts. That's, you know, there are very few types of single 
storage scaled, including, you know, very large--storage that 
can be brought, but, you know, you can't cite that everywhere, 
so there are other types of solutions. You know, the scale of 
this problem is, you know, a little bit on the higher side of 
the spectrum.
     Mr. Torres. And----
     Ms. Kim. Thank you.
     Mr. Torres. --Representative Kim, if I could add something 
really quickly, maybe to bridge between your two questions? 
It----
     Ms. Kim. Um-hum.
     Mr. Torres [continuing]. Really highlights the importance 
of government research and government involvement. The industry 
alone will not have the understanding of the evolving threat, 
and the national security implications of the work that they're 
doing. They also tend to focus on more near term research, and 
so, tying back to the universities, tying to the applied and 
basic research at the National Laboratories, with the national 
security in mind, I think is a key as we move forward. Thank 
you.
     Ms. Kim. Thank you. I know my time is up, so I want to 
thank all the witnesses for your thoughtful responses. Thank 
you. I yield back.
     Staff. Mrs. Fletcher is next.
     Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you, and thank you to Chairwoman 
Johnson and Ranking Member Lucas for holding this hearing 
today. It is incredibly important for those of us in Texas, and 
for the entire country, to understand what happened, and to 
craft legislation on this Committee to invest in and encourage 
research and development in grid technology, and reliable 
generation technology. I very much appreciate the witnesses 
sharing their expertise and time with us today, and in written 
testimony, which has been so helpful.
     As one of the Members of this Committee who lived through 
the Texas winter storm without power for several days, without 
water for several more, with a boil water notice for many days 
after that in my district in Houston, I want to underscore the 
seriousness of these cascading failures in both the physical 
market and the financial market. Today's hearing is important 
in making sure that we don't fail to respond in Congress. So 
many issues have been raised throughout this hearing, and there 
simply is not time for me to ask all the questions I have in 
these 5 minutes, so I will submit several questions to the 
witnesses for the record, and I look forward to your responses.
     Like Dr. Rai, I was--the temperatures in my own home were 
in the 40's, and I think even the 30's, during the event before 
I found my thermometer, but I was lucky. I had a fireplace, and 
I had warm clothes. Not very far from my house an 11-year-old 
boy, who had been overjoyed at seeing his first snow on Monday, 
froze to death in his own bed overnight. And he was not the 
only Texan who froze to death in this storm. Others died from 
carbon monoxide poisoning trying to keep warm. My constituents 
who are doctors told me they had never seen anything like the 
number of people they treated for carbon monoxide poisoning 
during this time.
     What we saw in Texas during the winter storm was a 
catastrophic failure of our electric grid, a catastrophic 
failure that didn't have to happen. There were ample warnings 
from both FERC and NERC about how the Texas grid was vulnerable 
to winter resilience issues that had been documented in detail 
after the 2011 winter storms. But years of inaction by our 
State legislature, our Governor, and his appointees at the 
Public Utility Commission left our State with a grid that 
focused on market profit at the expense of a resilient grid. 
While affordable energy should be a key priority of our grid 
system, Texans saw firsthand the catastrophe that occurs when a 
grid is unable to function and provide life-saving power when 
people need it the most.
     My colleague, Mr. Bera, recognizing that Texans have a 
well-known independent streak, mentioned that Texans perhaps 
choose to pay less than people in California for their energy. 
But in recent Wall Street Journal analysis has found that for 
two decades Texas customers have paid more for electricity than 
residents of States served by traditional utilities, $28 
billion more since 2004.
     Ms. Garza, given your years of experience at ERCOT, I'm 
interested in hearing your perspective on Texas's failure to 
plan for peak demand in the winter. And I won't be able to get 
to all of my questions, but I do want to focus on this because 
we haven't talked about it in this hearing. It's my 
understanding that when ERCOT planned for peak demand that 
would require distributors to shed load, it was done under the 
assumption that such an event would occur in the summer, when 
demand is typically highest. When ERCOT ordered distributors to 
shed load during the storm, the regional allocation for where 
loads had to be shed was geographically centered around areas 
where the summer demand would be the highest, particularly in 
Houston and in South Texas, despite the fact that the north in 
this case was experiencing higher demand. Is it your understand 
that this is the case?
     Ms. Garza. Yes, it is.
     Mrs. Fletcher. And do you agree with me that ERCOT should 
revisit this planning so that it's able to respond better to 
winter demand events?
     Ms. Garza. Yes, and I think that it's on the list of 
things to work on. The only thing I would caution you there is 
that, as you get further south in the State, you--there's more 
electric heat, and electric heat uses lots of electricity--the 
inefficient electric heat that generally exists the further 
south you go. And so--but factoring that in, and understanding 
a more seasonal distribution of load across the State to more 
fairly assign those curtailment responsibilities would be an 
appropriate step, and one that I think is underway.
     Mrs. Fletcher. Well, thank you, Ms. Garza. With my last 
few seconds I just want to mention, and ask this question, in 
your written testimony, and in your opening comments today, you 
mentioned that in setting standards we should have benefits 
that exceed costs, and noted the infrequency of cold weather in 
Texas is part of that analysis. With the deaths of at least 70 
Texans, the illnesses of many more, with tens of billions of 
dollars in damages to people's homes and businesses across the 
State, my question is whose costs are you referring to in your 
analysis? And, unfortunately, I'm out of time, so I'll take 
your response in--written response, but I really appreciate all 
of you being here today, and, Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Gonzalez is next.
     Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking 
Member Lucas, for holding this timely hearing today, and our 
distinguished witnesses for joining us. One thing I like about 
the Science Committee is we actually talk about facts, unlike 
the narratives that I see coming out on social media. In one 
case, when I flipped on my social media, which I'm one not to 
do, folks on the right saw it as the Texas blackouts, which 
were tragic, as justification for criticisms of wind turbines, 
and renewable energy generally. On the left, those opposed to 
federalism--free market ideas criticized Texas's deregulated 
energy market because some companies to prioritize cost over 
safety.
     Of course, the answer is both charges are true, partially. 
Power generation companies in Texas took a market risk and 
chose not to harden their facilities. I think we highlighted 
that today. And given the high variance of wind and solar, 
relying on renewables as a primary source of energy increases 
costs to consumers, can export jobs, and weakens energy 
independence. What we need is a system that works both ways. 
Renewable energy serves a purpose when it correctly supplements 
higher density energy sources. As cheaper, more effective 
technologies come online, they absolutely should be deployed. 
And, given the threat of uncontrollable weather events, Texas's 
power generators and utilities should be encouraged to 
winterize their facilities, and toughen the grid against 
extreme stress.
     We should also reconsider our approach to nuclear energy, 
which is a big priority of mine on this Committee, and across 
this Congress. While nat gas, coal, and renewable energy 
capacity plummeted during the blackouts, nuclear remained 
relatively reliable, operating at 74 percent of total capacity. 
I want to start with that fact specifically, and Dr. Jenkins. 
What is it about nuclear that allowed it to do better 
relatively? I know it too suffered, but relative to the other 
energy sources, is there something inherent to the technology, 
or is it coincidental? Just kind of walk me through what it is 
about nuclear that allowed it to be a little bit more resilient 
through the Texas cyclone.
     Dr. Jenkins. I mean, the main benefit that nuclear enjoys 
over natural gas in particular is it doesn't need fuel delivery 
during these kinds of events, and so it's one less 
vulnerability to supply disruptions on the fuel side of things. 
You know, the--these--because of the focus on safety and 
reliability in the nuclear power fleet as well, there are 
considerable efforts and investments made in maintaining the 
highest degree of reliability for those plants, and so they 
also tend to perform better during these sorts of extreme 
events as well because they are, you know, they're 
considerably, and justifiably, focused on maintaining the 
highest reliability.
     I think what the performance of the nuclear fleet also 
shows is that the diversity of resources helps decorrelate the 
failures, right? If you have 10 power plants that all have a 10 
percent chance of failure, but those aren't at all related to 
each other, the odds of them all failing at once are, like, 10 
to the negative ninth, you know, percent. It's, you know, 
infinitesimally small. But if they're all linked up to the same 
natural gas system, and that system goes down, or they're all 
in the same part of the transmission grid, and that 
transmission grid fails, then, their outages are correlated, 
and so I think we have to think carefully about how we 
diversity the risk exposure. And nuclear has its own risks, 
but, you know, there are different--they're different than 
those for other power sources, and that improves the resilience 
of our system through diversity.
     Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you. And, in your opinion, what do you 
think the appropriate role for nuclear is when it comes to 
generation, and our goals around reducing our carbon footprint?
     Dr. Jenkins. Well, I think there's two things to note. The 
first is that our existing nuclear power fleet is by far the 
cheapest source of clean firm generation capacity that we could 
have. Any new source of carbon-free firm generation is going to 
be more expensive, with rare exceptions, than maintaining our 
existing nuclear fleet as long as it is safe to operate. So 
that's the foundation upon which we can build toward a lower 
carbon and cleaner energy system. And then, in the future, 
newer nuclear power plants are one of several types of clean 
firm generation technologies. At the moment none are licensed 
for sale, right? We need to see----
     Mr. Gonzalez. Yeah.
     Dr. Jenkins [continuing]. The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission) process through for the new scale reactors, for the 
GE-Hitachi BWR-X, for the others that are moving their way 
through the process, and when they come to market, we'll be 
able to see if they can compete with other clean firm 
generation technologies, like advanced geothermal, or Allam 
cycle power plants, or natural gas power plants with carbon 
capture, biomass gasification, hydrogen turbines. There's a 
whole range of options, and all of those are in a more nascent 
state today than other technologies, and so I think the race is 
on, and the efforts that this Committee has made in the Energy 
Act, and other legislation, to support the development of those 
technologies will help propel them forward.
     Mr. Gonzalez. So fair to say, in your estimation, nuclear 
should play an important role in our energy generation future 
in the United States?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. I think it already plays an important 
role today, and it can sustain that role into the future as 
well, especially if the new technologies can be affordably 
built, and on time, with little risk, which has been the 
challenge so far for the nuclear fleet.
     Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you. I hope everyone was listening. I 
yield back.
     Staff. Mr. Perlmutter is next.
     Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you very much to our Chairwoman and 
to the Ranking Member for this panel. You guys are great, 
it's--and you've got a lot of stamina to answer all these 
questions for this long. I've got a couple, one for the panel 
generally. And one of the reasons that I've lasted this long is 
that there's a Coloradan on the panel, and so I want to start 
with him.
     Mr. Torres, you know, you've talked about microgrids a 
lot. Explain to me, and to us, you know, how a microgrid, you 
know, has helped with the California wildfires, how it could 
help with the wildfires that we face in Colorado from time to 
time. Let's start with that question. And then I have a general 
question to the whole panel. You can think about it. We're 
going to do an infrastructure bill, a big one, that's going to 
be loads of bridges, and waterworks, and broadband, but there's 
going to be an emphasis on the electrical grid. If all of you 
could think of a couple things you'd like to see us do, either 
regionally or nationally, to upgrade the grid? So--but I'd like 
to start with you, Mr. Torres.
     Mr. Torres. Thank you, Representative Perlmutter. So first 
maybe understand--we should get on the same page about what I'm 
referring to as a microgrid. A microgrid is a smaller grid tied 
to the bigger grid that can disconnect and reconnect as needed. 
And why would you want to do that? And there are some really 
good examples with regards to even the recent wildfires in 
California. Borrego Springs is a microgrid demonstration. We've 
been working with them for quite a while. They have a lot of 
issues with transmission line, and the lack of reliability at 
times for them. So they needed ways to make sure that we 
could--they could keep the local power up and running. With 
some local sources, you can use a variety of generation 
sources. Renewable solar, different types of gen sets, energy 
storage, and so on.
     We're seeing the trend for those kinds of organizations 
that have a high necessity for very, very reliable power. For 
example, military installations have been working this space 
for a long time, and there was a big demonstration I was 
involved in about 10 years ago called the Spiders demonstration 
with--between the military and the Department of Energy. There 
are also other, you know, resources--or, I'm sorry, other loads 
that really need high reliability power. For example, data 
centers. They need to increase the amount of reliability 
because some of the computer systems are very, very sensitive 
to power.
     So I believe in the future we're going to see a lot more 
owners and operators of various loads that will want to make 
sure that, if there's a loss of a transmission line, or loss of 
centralized generation, that they can still operate through. So 
I foresee--microgrids would be an important element of the 
future evolving grid.
     Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you. So, Dr. Tierney, let's go to 
you, and----
     Dr. Tierney. Well, thank you, because----
     Mr. Perlmutter. Yes.
     Dr. Tierney [continuing]. I live in Colorado, so you have 
a second Coloradan on this panel.
     Mr. Perlmutter. Well, let's go to you, and if you want to 
talk about microgrids, or how you think, as a general 
principle, we can upgrade the system.
     Dr. Tierney. Yeah, OK.
     Mr. Perlmutter. Give me a couple examples.
     Dr. Tierney. Well, and I'm going to talk about it in the 
context of a clean infrastructure recovery package, if that's 
OK. So I----
     Mr. Perlmutter. Sure.
     Dr. Tierney [continuing]. Think there could be elements 
associated with infusing more dollars into building energy 
efficiency. So boring that sounds, but what a difference that 
would make if buildings were buttoned up so that houses that 
were facing either extreme cold or hot events were much more 
able to withstand those kinds of outside temperatures. 
Especially doing that in low income areas, and bundling those 
two things together, would be very important.
     Second, there is a green bank that is now included--I 
think it's in the Clean Futures Act. It's the accelerator, 
Clean Energy Accelerator. It would be a multi-multi-billion 
dollar infusion of support for local investments that deal both 
with lowering greenhouse gas emissions with various types of 
projects, as well as equity considerations. Another, third, 
issue is tree planting in urban areas, where there are real hot 
spots. And tree planting in Colorado would not be a bad idea as 
well, just to restock the forests. Transmission investment, 
we've already talked about, and then finally, in your 
jurisdictional authority area, all of these investments in R&D 
for grid resiliency at various stages in the process, and to 
harden the grid, and deal with cyber security, they're ripe for 
inclusion in this package. How's that?
     Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you very much, and I want to thank 
the entire panel. I can't get to all of you, but I want to 
especially thank the Coloradans.
     Staff. Mr. Baird is next.
     Mr. Baird. Thank you. Madam Chair, and Ranking Member 
Lucas, I really appreciate your cooperation in bringing this 
kind of timely Science Committee meetings, and then to have the 
talent and capabilities of our witnesses, is very much 
appreciated. I always learn something.
     We're interested in research, research and development, 
and it's a recurring trend, I think, in the industry, per se, 
across the country about the need for government, and academia, 
as well as private industry, to work together so that we can 
continue to be successful and be a leader around the world 
using American technology. So the National Labs, I've been 
impressed with those, and the things that they do, and I think 
it's important that we focus on the kinds of research that you 
think are necessary. So I'm going to start with Mr. Rai.
     Dr. Rai, what do you think is the difference between 
academia research and private industry research? Are there 
priorities? Can you help prioritize where you think we need to 
go focusing on that research?
     Dr. Rai. Thank you for that question, Mr. Baird. One of 
the key things that academic research is--that it is long 
range, and more basic--as we heard earlier in this hearing, 
that typically the private industry also does a lot of 
research, but that's really much harder--year to, you know, 5 
years, and rarely it is, you know, out--10 years out. But a lot 
of the question that you're talking about, not of the research 
that can be done, really is--benefit in the long run. We heard 
about many computing technologies, about hydraulic fracturing, 
about storage technologies, wind and solar, these took a long 
view, lot of investment over multiple decades, and then 
supported demand for policy as--and so, you know, there's 
really this sequencing--there's a lot of interaction, but still 
there's a sequencing in terms of both the nature of the 
problem, which are more fundamental, as well as the time 
horizon that the academic research really depreciates itself, 
but it has a very fundamental place, in terms of generating 
that diversity of powerful ideas that can then really play out 
in the--over time.
     Mr. Baird. Thank you. Would you agree with the idea that 
private industry can't really justify just basic research, 
whereas academia, we invest in that basic research, and we 
still get a return at some point down the road? It may not look 
like important research at the moment, but down the road 
private industry kind of picks that up. Is that--have I got an 
appropriate analysis of that situation or not?
     Dr. Rai. Absolutely, sir. It has played out again and 
again in very big ways--in very radical big ways that change 
the world forever in multiple sentences. So, yes, sir.
     Dr. Jenkins. Congressman, if I could just add to that, the 
partnership between universities and National Laboratories also 
extends beyond the basic research. There's applied research 
programs carried out in partnership with industry that continue 
to provide critical incremental innovations that move these 
technologies along and make American technological companies--
technology companies, you know, maintain their competitive edge 
as well. So it extends into that translational and applied 
research realm also.
     Dr. Tierney. And especially because some of this grid 
resiliency R&D is really a public good, and no private company 
can really monetize its investment in R&D for such a broad-
based thing. We really do need R&D in this area federally 
funded.
     Mr. Torres. Yeah, if I could add something as well, I 
think that partnership across academia, where they could focus 
on longer term research, basic research, higher risk, where 
industry cannot. They need to have a return, something that's a 
little bit more certain, with lower risk, and the laboratories 
kind of cover that spectrum. One of the roles that we have here 
at NREL is providing that bridge, taking, you know, the basic 
and applied research, and working with industry, going from, 
hey, can we prove this in a laboratory, but can this--to the 
next level, can we actually deploy it? How would it deploy, and 
can we minimize the risk before it gets deployed in full scale?
     Mr. Baird. Thank you. Ms. Garza, you got any comment?
     Ms. Garza. So my--no. Short answer is no.
     Dr. Jenkins. Could I just maybe add that I just strongly 
encourage the Committee to work with your colleagues to ensure 
appropriations that fulfill the kinds of authorizations 
included in the Energy Act? You've made enormous, you know, 
focus on the kinds of innovative priorities that we have, and 
we're talking about here, but unless the budget comes through, 
it's not going to be something that the labs, and universities, 
and private sector can tackle.
     Mr. Baird. Well, thank all of you for being here, and I 
see I'm out of time, so the Chair will probably cut me off 
right quick. Thank you.
     Staff. Ms. Ross is recognized next.
     Ms. Ross. Thank you so much, and thank you, Madam 
Chairwoman, for having this important hearing, and in such a 
timely way. I--I'm from North Carolina, and we are no stranger 
to odd weather, hurricanes. Today tornadoes are predicted in my 
district, and having a resilient energy grid, and a modern 
energy grid, is so, so important to not just delivering the 
energy every day, but dealing with these severe weather 
incidents.
     My first question is to Ms. Garza. In your testimony you 
speak about the need for better long-term forecasting of 
potential conditions. And, as I said, North Carolina's no 
stranger to severe weather, including severe winter weather. As 
a matter of fact, we--in our integrated resource planning, 
winter peaking has replaced summer peaking because of severe 
winter weather. I don't know if you knew that about North 
Carolina, but it was a surprise to a lot of people. We have 
tropical storms, hurricanes, flooding, and--so this can happen 
year-round. Could you please elaborate on how improved 
forecasting could help utility companies, State and local 
authorities, and consumers prepare for extreme weather events, 
like the one that happened in Texas, and happens frequently in 
North Carolina?
     Ms. Garza. Sure. You know, as I've mentioned, the, you 
know, the typical pattern has been to just look back at, well, 
how bad has the weather been, and let's assume that that's as 
bad as it's--it will be, and with additional population, 
additional uses, what will my demand for electricity be? And 
clearly that was insufficient here in Texas. One of the reasons 
for that look back would be for States like yours, in North 
Carolina, that are regulated, and they have to justify those 
expenses. It's easy to justify, well, I'm going to build for 
this, because we know it's happened. And unless there's 
additional input that says, well, the risk is larger than what 
you've actually occurred, I could see where it would be 
difficult for utilities that are reliant on rate-based 
recovery, or, you know, regulated rates of return, to justify 
additional expenditures. So that's another reason, another 
justification, for outside help, you know, input into the 
electric utility to make sure that they're adequately planning 
for the long term, whether it's heat, or cold, or storms, or 
whatever.
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, and Congressman, this is----
     Dr. Tierney [continuing]. I add to that, please? Because 
forecasting, and R&D in support of much finer forecasting, has 
this long-term component for demand, and it should take into 
consideration changes in the climate for sure. But there are 
short term operational forecasting issues where integration 
between wind forecasts and local effects, heat forecasts in 
certain areas, demand forecasts on a couple of days ahead. 
Those--and the forecast of outage probabilities of facilities 
under different kinds of climate events. Those kinds of 
things--that's a really important R&D--for resilience.
     Ms. Ross. Thank you----
     Dr. Jenkins. And as I----
     Ms. Ross [continuing]. Very, very much. Yes?
     Dr. Jenkins. Sorry----
     Ms. Ross. Somebody else want to jump in?
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. As I emphasize in 
my testimony as well, I do think that additional climate 
science investment that focuses on this question of how these 
extreme weather events and threats are changing, you know, the 
probability distribution is moving, and it's those tail events 
that are the big threats to our system, and so those just get a 
little bit more likely. That has huge implications for how we 
plan and prepare our systems, and we need the forward-looking 
science to be able to help guide us as the climate changes over 
the next several decades.
     Ms. Ross. Thank you, Dr. Jenkins. My next question is for 
you. We--North Carolina's currently No. 2 in solar in the 
country, and--so we're interested in clean firm energy. I've 
represented solar companies, and actually connecting to the 
grid sometimes is the thing that keeps them from being able to 
realize their projects. You argue that we don't need every 
source of electricity to be reliable all the time, we just need 
the overall system to be reliable. In our last 23 seconds, 
could you just discuss further how we might be able to do that 
with an improved grid?
     Dr. Jenkins. Well, I think the critical need is for 
technologies that can replace, ultimately, our natural gas 
fleet, and our retiring coal, and eventually nuclear power 
plants that can provide a similar role as those power plants 
play today, but without the carbon dioxide emissions and air 
pollution associated with fossil generation today. So that 
could be advanced nuclear, natural gas plants with carbon 
capture and storage, advanced geothermal technologies. That 
could be potentially be very low cost, very long duration 
energy storage, although those typically are only a partial 
complement or substitute, and potentially hydrogen production, 
which could come from renewable sources, could come from 
biomass, and it could come from natural gas with carbon 
capture, all of which would provide a zero carbon fuel that 
could be used in converted natural gas power plants in the 
longer run.
     So all of those are options, and I think, again, as I 
mentioned earlier, the race is on between them to see which 
will be developed and scalable, and I think we need a diversity 
of those technologies because what works in North Carolina may 
not be what works in Texas, or in Minnesota, or in New England. 
And so we need a mix of resources that can play that role, the 
right, you know, role in each parts of the country.
     Ms. Ross. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back.
     Staff. Ms. Bonamici is next.
     Ms. Bonamici. --Member Lucas, and thank you to our 
witnesses for joining us today. I regret I couldn't be in the 
entire hearing, but I care a lot about this very important 
topic. And we know that as we transition to a 100 percent clean 
energy economy our electric grid will be a central feature of a 
comprehensive climate strategy. Our grid needs to be clean, 
reliable, and, importantly, resilient to climate threats.
     According to a recent report from the University of 
California Berkeley an infrastructure build out needed to 
achieve a 90 percent carbon would support approximately 550,000 
jobs each year, and avoid at least $1.2 trillion in cumulative 
health and environmental challenges. Last--I joined my 
colleagues on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in 
releasing a bold, comprehensive, science-based climate action 
plan reaching net zero emissions no later than mid-century, and 
net negative thereafter. Our plan includes many recommendations 
on grid resilience, including Congressman Bera's bill, which I 
know we're focusing on today.
     According to a report from the Government Accountability 
Office, GAO, released just last week, the climate crisis could 
affect every aspect of the grid, from generation, transmission, 
and distribution to demand for electricity, and cost billions 
of dollars annually. GAO specifically found that the Department 
of Energy does not have a strategy, goals, objectives, or 
performance measures to guide its efforts to enhance the 
resilience of the grid--climate crisis. And this is of 
particular concern to Oregonians in my State because of our 
raging wildfire season and other reasons as well.
     So, Dr. Tierney, how can the DOE best work with Federal 
science agencies to better understand, predict, and respond to 
grid threats from the climate----
     Dr. Tierney. There are dozens of things that the 
Department of Energy should be doing, and I think there is a 
groundswell of support for becoming more aggressive on 
resiliency issues. There was a wonderful program called the 
Grid Modernization Program that was authorized for 5 years, I 
think, Juan? Is that right? And continuing and depending that 
kind of work, supported--supporting work at the labs, will be 
extremely important on these issues.
     But also, as you say, standard setting for performance is 
badly needed. It's a tough area, when you think about those 
different levels of the system, generation, transmission, 
distribution, and demand, but hard work needs to be done there. 
Thank you for the question.
     Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And following up on 
Representative Ross's question, Dr. Jenkins, I appreciated the 
reference in your testimony to not needing every source of 
electricity be--to be reliable all the time, and instead 
focusing on the system, that requires a mix of electricity 
resources, all playing the right role on the electricity team--
isn't--important that we think about equitable access to--
affordable clean energy so you can discuss the opportunities to 
make our transition to a 100 percent clean energy reliable and 
resistant grid equitable for vulnerable communities who have 
been on the front lines of the climate crisis?
     Dr. Jenkins. Well, I think that the--first I should add, 
Representative Bonamici, I was born and raised in your 
district, so it's a pleasure----
     Ms. Bonamici. I'm honored.
     Dr. Jenkins [continuing]. To talk with you. I think that 
there are huge benefits--potential benefits to a transition to 
a cleaner energy system for all communities, including those 
that are currently suffering the most from air pollution from 
our current fossil energy mix. You referenced a Berkeley Labs 
study on the 90 percent reductions in--or 90 percent clean by 
2035 power system. I'd refer you to the Net Zero America study 
that we worked out of Princeton as well, which estimates very 
similar benefits for--in terms of reduced air pollution, 
particularly from the phaseout of our coal fired power plants, 
which Oregon is scheduled to retire its last coal fired power 
plant later this--in a couple years, and this could result in--
that, and electrification of vehicles, which are the major 
source of urban air pollution, could substantially reduce 
exposure to air pollution, and save significant lives and costs 
for households and communities.
     The other thing we have to think carefully about is where 
we want to direct investment in the new industries that are 
growing to deploy, you know, clean energy, and to manufacture 
the products there, and to ensure that those are distributed 
across our country in ways that communities in transition 
benefit from. And Oregon knows very keenly the challenges of a 
large-scale transition. I grew up in the aftermath of the 
timber wars, and the, you know, the impacts that the phase-out 
of the timber industry had across Oregon communities, and I 
think we need to make sure that we're proactively investing in 
economic development and diversification in communities that 
are currently relying on fossil generation or fossil fuel 
production as part of this.
     Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Dr. Jenkins. I'm working on a 
national transition legislation, so we really do absolutely 
need to focus on those front-line communities. I also want to 
mention too, because you're an Oregonian, that we're doing some 
really exciting work on marine energy----
     Dr. Jenkins. Um-hum.
     Ms. Bonamici [continuing]. Off the coast because, unlike 
the sun and the wind, the waves are constant, so there's a 
tremendous amount of potential to capture the power of the 
waves, tides, currents. So----
     Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, as--along with floating offshore wind 
turbines, which could open up a huge--I mean, the West Coast 
has the windiest, you know, highest wind potential in the 
country, if we could cost-effectively tap into it.
     Ms. Bonamici. Well I'm, of course, working in 
collaboration with all our coastal partners. There's--
tremendous amount of potential. Thank you very much, Madam 
Chair. I yield back.
     Staff. Chairwoman Johnson, all the Members present have 
been recognized already, so I think we're ready to close out 
the hearing.
     Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much to all of our 
tremendous witnesses. We are delighted that you had the time to 
spend with us, and I'll thank all of our Members for 
participating. Before we bring the hearing to a close, I would 
just simply like to say to our witnesses to stay close. We 
might have some questions that you might receive, and we 
really, really, really appreciate your input.
     The record will remain open for at least 2 weeks for 
additional statements from the Members, or to submit questions 
for our witnesses. And--so now I'll--whatever questions that 
our Committee Members might ask witnesses. Our witnesses now 
are excused, and our hearing is adjourned.
     [Whereupon, at 12:57 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

                               Appendix I

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                   Answers to Post-Hearing Questions


Responses by Dr. Jesse Jenkins
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

Responses by Dr. Sue Tierney
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


                              Appendix II

                              ----------                              


                   Additional Material for the Record

    Executive summary of a report submitted by Representative Casten
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    [For full report see: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/
2020-04/08-16-11-
report.pdf]
              Documents submitted by Representative Posey
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

               Article submitted by Representative Posey
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                Report submitted by Representative Babin
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                            [all]