[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 17 (Monday, January 29, 2007)]
[House]
[Pages H975-H978]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                REVOLUTIONIZING AMERICA'S ENERGY POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Georgia). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 18, 2007, the gentleman from Washington 
(Mr. Inslee) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mr. INSLEE. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor this evening to continue 
the effort to revolutionize American energy. We had the first 
breakthrough here just about a week and a half ago where the U.S. House 
of Representatives took the first step in the clean energy revolution.
  I think it was long overdue, and I think it is going to be much 
enjoyed by Americans, because what we did about a week and a half ago 
was take the first step toward freeing ourselves from the shackles of 
oil and gas and in fact starting down the road toward clean energy with 
a high-tech clean energy future.
  The way we did that, we reeled back in $14 billion of giveaways to 
the oil and gas industry, the most profitable industry in the history 
of the solar system, that had been given under the previous Congress; 
and we put that money for Americans to use to develop a clean energy 
future that can depend upon Midwestern farmers rather than Middle 
Eastern sheiks.
  This really was a first step on a long road toward a clean energy 
future for America. It was a very, very important first step.
  This evening I wanted to share with my colleagues some folks I have 
met whose lives are intertwined with that clean energy future.
  We call the clean energy future the new Apollo Project because we 
believe we need a new high-tech energy future for this country every 
bit as bold and revolutionary and visionary as John Kennedy's original 
Apollo Project when he stood behind me in 1961 and said America was 
going to place a man on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, 
and that happened.
  We believe that we need that same spirit, that same idea that our 
genius, our innovation and inventiveness in America can create new 
technologies to provide us new energy.
  The people I wanted to talk about tonight are all people I have met 
in the last month and are people who I believe exhibit why we need the 
new Apollo energy project and why it was a good idea for Congress to 
have created this clean energy fund, take money out of oil and gas and 
put it into clean energy. I would like to talk about some of those 
folks.
  The first two people I want to talk about are exhibits A and B as to 
why we need a new clean energy future.
  One is President Note of the Marshall Islands who is a gracious 
fellow. I met him on Bainbridge Island awhile back.

                              {time}  2115

  When I talked to him, he told me about the plight of his Nation, the 
Marshall Islands in the southern Pacific, very, very low atolls. They 
are essentially coral reefs, and they are just a few feet above sea 
level. What the President of the Marshall Islands told me is that his 
Nation is now threatened by sea level rises associated with global 
warming, together with the coral reefs that can be occasioned by 
acidification in the ocean and increasing water temperature, again 
because of global warming and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
  What President Note told me is that, for the last year or so, they 
have had to take emergency provisions to keep the sea from encroaching 
where they live, essentially. They are now starting to have active 
consideration of where folks will have to go after they leave the 
Marshall Islands when the seas swallow the Marshall Islands or make 
them uninhabitable.
  Another problem they are having is the storms are increasing in 
severity as well.
  So here we have the President of a nation state who was in Seattle 
this weekend pleading for us to take measures to stop global warming to 
try to preserve his nation. I thought this

[[Page H976]]

could be the first nation really destroyed by environmental catastrophe 
associated with an energy policy that is polluting the atmosphere with 
so much carbon dioxide.
  President Note was pretty convincing that as an act of humanity we 
should not allow his nation to drown, and to me it was sort of a 
common-sense, human thing to do, to ask me to talk to my colleagues 
about what we could do about that, and so I am here tonight.
  The second person I want to talk about is the director of relocation 
for a town called Shishmareff, which is a town on the northern coast of 
Alaska. This is a town that has been there for 4,000 years in some 
village system or otherwise. For 4,000 years, people have enjoyed 
living there, but now they are being swallowed by the sea. The Arctic 
Ocean is essentially intruding into the town.
  If you go and google Shishmareff, Alaska, you will see pictures of 
the houses simply falling down into the ocean. For a combination of 
reasons, the tundra is melting underneath their houses, and the ocean 
is intruding because an ice barrier that formerly protected their 
village has melted. So they are both having the tundra melt underneath 
them and the storm waves coming in and washing away the town.
  About 3 weeks ago, the town voted to move 13 miles, move the whole 
town, kit and caboodle, to the mainland. They are now on a coastal 
barrier island, and this will be the first town, Shishmareff, Alaska, 
the first town that falls victim to global warming in the United 
States, the first American town.
  I cannot be thinking that that is something to be proud of, that we 
have an energy policy that allows the oil and gas industry and others 
to put untold amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is 
actually destroying an American town.
  I think we ought to rally to the idea that we do not allow American 
towns to be swallowed by a problem. We have got to solve the problem.
  So there are two people, the President of the Marshall Islands and 
the leader of Shishmareff, Alaska, both of whom are having their 
communities literally being swallowed up and having to move at some 
point because we have an energy policy that is fit for the 19th 
century, not the 21st century.
  That is the bad news, but now I want to shift to some people I have 
met who have given me a huge amount of confidence that we can deal with 
this problem. Because I think if you spend time talking to the 
scientists and the inventors and innovators, as I have during the last 
year, you would be convinced that Americans, the country that had 
people who invented the light bulb, the jet airplane, went to the moon, 
perfected the Internet and mapped the human genome, are capable of 
creating a new energy future that will not allow the destruction of 
other American towns. The reason I believe that is because I know these 
people. I just want to share some of the people I have met in the last 
month.
  Last Friday, I met people from a company called General Compression, 
and these are scientists who have invented a way to make a compressor 
about 80 percent more efficient which does not sound too thrilling, I 
suppose, until you think what it can do. Because what they can do with 
this compressor is put it on the top of a wind turbine and use the wind 
turbine that blows in the wind to compress air and then take that air 
and can pump it down into subterranean caverns and keep stored air 
under high pressure that then can be vented and used like a big 
battery. When you vent this compressed air, it can drive a turbine and 
generate electricity.
  Now, the upshot of all this technology is it means that we can take 
wind turbines and essentially connect them to a giant battery in the 
form of compressed air to store that energy. This is very, very 
important in the effort to have clean energy because now we can make 
wind turbines part of the grid. We can have energy that wind turbines 
create. We can have access to it even when the wind does not blow. Wind 
does not always blow, except here in the House of Representatives, of 
course.
  So this, for the first time, when this technology is perfected, and 
it is not perfect yet, will be able to perhaps double the revenues that 
can be generated from wind turbines, a clean energy source that does 
not emit one pound of carbon dioxide when we generate that electricity.
  So here is a tremendous breakthrough that could make radical changes 
in our energy policy by perhaps doubling the efficacy, at least the 
revenue generation of wind turbine farms. We have had a bunch of them 
go up in the State of Washington. We have the largest wind turbine farm 
in North America in the State of Washington, which is already as cheap 
as any other type of energy that we have. So there is one company.
  The second company, the day before I had in my office a company 
called A123 Battery. It is a company in Massachusetts, scientists who 
have spun off of MIT, largely; and A123 Battery company is a company 
that has developed a lithium ion battery which has tremendous capacity 
essentially for storing electricity. They have now signed an agreement 
with General Motors in an effort to provide the battery for the Volt, 
the first plug-in hybrid that GM has announced they would like to build 
in several years.

  A123 Battery company, it is exciting because their technology, once 
it becomes commercialized, once it becomes packaged in a reliable 
source that we can make sure we can put in our car, will allow us to 
have plug-in hybrids, a car that we can take home at night, plug into a 
garage outlet, next day drive it up to 40 miles on electricity. And 
over 60 percent of our trips are under 40 miles a day, but if you want 
to go over 40 miles a day, then you have an auxiliary internal 
combustion engine that will burn either gasoline or ethanol that can 
take you the rest of the mileage as far as you want to drive.
  So it is a plug-in, flex-fuel hybrid vehicle. Plug-in meaning you 
plug in at night, flex-fuel meaning runs on a gasoline or ethanol, and 
hybrid means it has electric and internal combustion engine.
  So this company now has sort of answered the $64,000 question of how 
we are going to have enough battery capacity; and all they need to do, 
as they explained to me, is to mount some engineering. The science is 
there. Now they need the engineering.
  This is very exciting to think that in 5, maybe 6, 7 years, we will 
be able to have an electrical driven car, by and large, that we can 
distribute energy over the electrical system.
  Think about when you put those two companies I just talked about, put 
those two companies together. General Compression, which can perhaps 
double the efficacy of the wind turbine, that can generate electricity 
that goes out over the wires to your garage, that you plug in your car 
at night and drive off and get 40 miles on electricity and unlimited 
mileage on your gas or ethanol, a clean system, with zero carbon 
dioxide emissions. There is some pretty good news, and they are not the 
only one.
  Now maybe we will not have wind turbine-driven electricity. Maybe we 
will have clean coal. You know, most of the energy is from coal, from 
electricity right now in the United States, and it is very dirty, huge 
gigatons of carbon dioxide which are responsible for global warming, 
but there may be a way we can burn it cleanly.
  We can put it through a combined cycle process that can take the 
carbon dioxide out of the stream. We turn the coal into hydrogen. We 
burn the hydrogen in a gas turbine, and that generates electricity. But 
we have got to have some place to put the carbon dioxide so it does not 
get in the atmosphere. We basically sequester it, and we pump it under 
high pressure into the ground, and it stays there for hundreds of 
years, but it takes a lot of energy to compress that CO2. 
For every two coal-fired plants, you have to have one just for the 
energy to suppress this CO2.
  But a company I talked to yesterday called RAMGEN in Tacoma, 
Washington, RAMGEN has a nascent technology using a very sophisticated 
technology to increase the efficiency of compressors by very 
significant amounts, which would allow us to compress this carbon 
dioxide and use much less electricity to do it.
  So here we have a situation where we have these three companies I 
just talked about that may mean we would be able to have affordable, 
clean coal

[[Page H977]]

electricity to go into our electrical grid to power our plug-ins; and, 
if not that, then we have wind turbine technology to power our plug-ins 
with a battery that works.
  That is a beautifully elegant system that can keep the Shishmareff 
towns and the Marshall Islands that are being swallowed by the sea and 
keep us having cars that do not have to drive on oil from the Middle 
East. That is a pretty nice system. So there is a lot of great news out 
there, because there is a lot of great innovation out there.
  But the question is, what can we here in Congress do to accelerate 
that rate and that pace of innovation, and this is the third thing I 
would like to address tonight. We have talked about the problem. We 
have talked about the people who are solving it, innovation, but we 
have a role here, too, to help accelerate that rate of innovation.
  I would like tonight to talk about some of the things, not all of the 
things, but some of the things we can do here in Congress.
  First, what we can do is try to accelerate the rate of the 
commercialization of this plug-in hybrid battery. It is still going to 
take some engineering to make sure the battery is put in sequence in a 
crash-worthy system.
  We can pass a bill I introduced last week with some colleagues called 
the grid plug-in hybrid vehicle bill that will use some of this $14 
billion that we have set aside for research that will help this 
industrial application get off the ground. It would also provide 
incentives for consumers to buy these products so we can help increase 
the demand for them; and, of course, we know once we increase demand, 
the cost of these goes down, the more we have on the road.
  The bill would also create a Federal testing ground. We have several 
of these now that help prove the concept of these--that prove these 
concepts work, and we would build on that by providing another test 
facility to certify the safety and reliability of these systems.
  So here is one bill that can help speed this transition to an 
electrical driven car, and we are very close to doing it. It may happen 
without Federal action, later rather than sooner, but we cannot wait. 
We cannot wait because of our dependence on foreign oil, and we cannot 
wait as the scientific panel will come out with its report this Friday 
again noting the danger we face as a country as a result of global 
warming.
  So that is one thing we can do, pass this plug-in, flex-fuel hybrid 
vehicle bill.
  Secondly, what we can do is make it easier for people to generate 
their own electricity. You know, photovoltaic energy where you put 
solar cells on your roof is becoming close to being market-driven. 
There are some very, very exciting things going on in photovoltaic 
energy right now.
  A company in California called NanoSolar is producing 450 megawatts 
of thin cell solar cells which they hope will decrease the cost of 
photovoltaic cells dramatically, another company called MiaSole. But we 
want to make it easier for you. If you want to put it on your roof, 
when you generate more electricity, you are feeding it back into the 
grid, to basically--to sell electricity you grow at your home, home-
grown electricity back to the utility company.

                              {time}  2130

  We want to make sure that you can get paid for that. So we have 
another bill called the net metering bill. Net metering basically means 
that you net on your meter what you used from the utility against what 
you produce and sell back to the utility.
  This bill would create a right for you as a consumer, under certain 
rules that were set up, to sell your electricity back to your utility, 
make sure you can hook up, have a Federal standard to do that. That is 
the key to being able to get to what we call a distributed generation 
system, where we can have generators all around the country, including 
on our rooftops and our businesses and our homes, not just in large 
coal plants and large hydroelectric dams.
  This is a pretty simple thing to do. It has been blocked now for 4 
years in Congress. We are hoping that it can get through this year, a 
simple thing to do.
  Third, we have got to increase our research and development in all of 
these high-tech energy fields. I just mentioned several of them. There 
are many others, wave power. We now have the first wave power plant 
that has been proposed off the coast of Oregon, 50 megawatts, with 
buoys that bob up and down underneath the surface that can generate 
very considerable electricity. There is enough electricity that could 
be generated off a 10-by-10 square mile area off the coast of 
California that, if the buoys can be shown to survive ocean conditions, 
can have all the electricity California could use. It is pretty 
amazing.
  Now, there are hurdles to show that these buoys can survive in the 
wave power, but we need to do more in the wave conditions. We need to 
do more R&D on this. We need more R on the clean coal. We need more R&D 
on the solar thermal, which we are having great success with lately.
  The reason we know this is because when we compare this to other 
major challenges, we are really pathetic. We are pathetic when it comes 
to doing R&D and energy right now.
  You know, this challenge we have is at least as visionary as going to 
the Moon, but it affects our planet rather than the Moon. Yet we are 
spending one-seventh of what was spent and invested in the new Apollo 
Project, one-seventh per year what we spent on getting to the Moon.
  That is a sad commentary on our failure to act with dispatch when it 
comes to energy. We would not have gotten to the Moon, probably ever, 
had we had such a skimpy, weak, pathetic amount of research into this 
basic science. We have all this explosion of information going on 
between nanotechnology and biofuels, which we haven't even yet talked 
about tonight. We have got to ramp up that Federal R&D. That is the 
third thing we need to do.
  Fourth, we need to have major steps forward to advance our biofuels 
potential in this country. We have enormous potential in this country 
for biofuels. I have read the last few days some articles and 
newspapers by pundits who get to say anything they want. They don't 
ever have to run for election, so it doesn't matter what it is, really, 
I suppose.
  But these pundits have suggested that biofuels could not play an 
important part of our role, and those people are not talking to the 
scientists who recognize the breakthrough technology that we are on the 
cusp of enjoying in this country to dramatically increase the 
productivity of biofuels. Now, we know we are already producing very 
significant sums of ethanol and some biodiesel in this country. We know 
that that can increase.
  But what folks don't understand is that these biofuels, we are ready 
to take giant leaps forward to leapfrog the corn ethanol that we now 
use, and corn ethanol right now is what we might think of as the first-
generation biofuel. It is kind of like the Wright brothers' flier. It 
works, you can fly, but it is just a start. We are going to enjoy 
succeeding generations of biofuels.
  The first one that we will have will be cellulosic ethanol. 
Cellulosic ethanol is a fancy term that basically means instead of just 
using the seed of a plant to distill ethanol, you use the whole plant. 
You don't just use a kernel of the corn. You use everything, what they 
call the corn stover that grows above the ground. You mash it up, and 
you put an enzyme in it to break down the carbohydrates in the cell, 
then you distill the carbohydrates and you make ethanol.
  When we do this, we will increase the productivity of the Midwestern 
farmer by a factor of two or three, not 5 or 10 percent, but by a 
factor of two or three. We will generate two or three times as much 
energy and money per acre as we are generating right now. This 
technology is ready for the first commercial plant, which should be in 
Idaho, a company called Iogen, that is ready as soon as they get a loan 
guarantee from Uncle Sam so they can build the first commercial plant 
to do this.
  When we do this, we will be able to have a very significant amount of 
our transportation fueled by domestically produced biofuel. This is not 
me just saying this. This is the Department of Energy that has done 
extensive analyses of this, Department of Agriculture, a whole suite of 
agronomists

[[Page H978]]

who have looked at it, who have basically concluded that in 25 years we 
can have 25 to 30 percent of our transportation fuels fueled by this, 
by this stream of domestically produced ethanol.
  That is just a beginning. That is a second generation. A third 
generation could include algae. Algae has the capability of producing 
50 times as much at least per acre as even the second generation of 
biofuels.
  There is at least one company that has at least one commercial 
application of that technology now, basically to make diesel fuel out 
of algae. That is the kind of thing we need to invest in, and that is 
what we need to start doing.
  Last, I want to mention something that is pivotal to driving these 
technologies, and that is the technologies that I have talked about 
tonight all operate under an enormous competitive disadvantage. They 
have to compete with other industries that have a huge subsidy that 
they don't get, and that's the subsidy that the fossil fuel industry 
has because they get to put their carbon dioxide, their pollution, in 
the atmosphere for free.
  Now, you think about that. If a coal-fired utility right now can put 
its garbage, its pollution, its carbon dioxide, its pollutant that is 
damaging the Earth's atmosphere, that is damaging the atmosphere by the 
megaton and not pay a dime for it, in unlimited amounts, now, compared 
to what you do and what we do when we go to our county garbage dump 
with a pickup full of stuff out of our garden, goodness knows what we 
have got in the back of our basements, we have to pay money to dump our 
stuff in a limited space, because there is only a limited space in a 
garbage dump.
  But utilities that put all this pollution in our atmosphere, which 
has limited carrying capacity for carbon dioxide, get to do it for free 
for as much as they want. That is a huge subsidy of those industries.
  If you are a small company in California building solar cells or 
ocean-powered technology or wind turbines, or if you are a farmer in 
Ohio that is going to build cellulosic ethanol and sell it, you don't 
get that subsidy. It is an unfair subsidy, and it needs to stop.
  The U.S. Congress needs to stand up on our hind legs and pass a cap 
and trade system to cap, to limit, to put a ceiling on the amount of 
carbon dioxide that can go in our atmosphere from these polluting 
industries. When we have that cap, when we limit the amount of carbon 
dioxide that can be put in, two things are going to happen.
  We are going to protect our atmosphere for our grandchildren; and, 
second, we are going to give a boost to these new businesses that are 
really ready to start producing these products to become commercially 
available for the clean energy future of this country. That is a big 
two-fer, a clean, healthy environment and an energetic economy.
  All of the things I have talked about tonight will help produce both 
things. This is a situation where we are going to have the cleanest 
policy in congressional history and the most robust economy in American 
history once we develop these new technologies, because we need to be 
the country that fulfills our destiny as being the inventors of the 
world.
  You know, China is going to need this technology. They are building 
one dirty coal-fired plant a week, and they are going to need clean 
energy technology. We should be the one selling it to them.
  Here is a great way to restore the imbalance of trade between us and 
China. One of these companies, the director of Ramgen, this company 
that may be able to do this clean coal technology, was going to China 
today, and here is a perfect example of how we can start to fix this 
terrible trade imbalance we have when we can be the sellers to the 
world to this clean energy technology.
  So, in summary, there is some good news and bad news here tonight. 
The bad news is we have some fellow Americans whose talent is being 
destroyed by global warming in Shishmareff, Alaska.
  We have a fellow citizen in the world, the Marshall Islands, whose 
country is being devoured by global warming. That is the bad news.
  But the good news is we have a great combination of innovators, 
inventors, business people that are ready to tackle this problem and 
create these new technological solutions to this problem. One day we 
will be driving clean cars. We will have cleaner homes with better 
efficiency. We are going to lick this problem of global warming at the 
same time we are going to grow the U.S. economy.
  That is a message that this Congress, I am proud to say, is now 
sending for the first time. We have broken the chains of the oil and 
gas industry. We have broken the chains of the 19th century, and we 
have entered a new century of clean energy technology.
  I will look forward to more successes so we can help Americans 
continue to invent. It really is the American destiny to pass the new 
Apollo energy project and do just what John F. Kennedy did, take this 
country to a new vision.

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