[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 54 (Monday, April 7, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2628-S2632]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




NEW DIRECTION FOR ENERGY INDEPENDENCE, NATIONAL SECURITY, AND CONSUMER 
PROTECTION ACT AND THE RENEWABLE ENERGY AND ENERGY CONSERVATION TAX ACT 
                                OF 2007

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
resume consideration of H.R. 3221, which the clerk will report.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 3221) moving the United States toward greater 
     energy independence and security, developing innovative new 
     technologies, reducing carbon emissions, creating green jobs, 
     protecting consumers, increasing clean renewable energy 
     production, and modernizing our energy infrastructure, and to 
     amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide tax 
     incentives for the production of renewable energy and energy 
     conservation.

  Pending:

       Dodd/Shelby amendment No. 4387, in the nature of a 
     substitute.
       Sanders amendment No. 4401 (to amendment No. 4387), to 
     establish a national consumer credit usury rate.
       Cardin/Ensign amendment No. 4421 (to amendment No. 4387), 
     to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to allow a credit 
     against income tax for the purchase of a principal residence 
     by a first-time home buyer.
       Ensign amendment No. 4419 (to amendment No. 4387), to amend 
     the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for the limited 
     continuation of clean energy production incentives and 
     incentives to improve energy efficiency in order to prevent a 
     downturn in these sectors that would result from a lapse in 
     the tax law.
       Alexander amendment No. 4429 (to amendment No. 4419), to 
     provide a longer extension of the renewable energy production 
     tax credit and to encourage all emerging renewable sources of 
     electricity.
       Nelson (FL)/Coleman amendment No. 4423 (to amendment No. 
     4387), to provide for the penalty-free use of retirement 
     funds to provide foreclosure recovery relief for individuals 
     with mortgages on their principal residences.
       Lincoln amendment No. 4382 (to amendment No. 4387), to 
     provide an incentive to employers to offer group legal plans 
     that provide a benefit for real estate and foreclosure 
     review.
       Lincoln (for Snowe) amendment No. 4433 (to amendment No. 
     4387), to modify the increase in volume cap for housing bonds 
     in 2008.
       Landrieu amendment No. 4404 (to amendment No. 4387), to 
     amend the provisions relating to qualified mortgage bonds to 
     include relief for persons in areas affected by Hurricanes 
     Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.
       Sanders amendment No. 4384 (to amendment No. 4387), to 
     provide an increase in specially adapted housing benefits for 
     disabled veterans.

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.


                Amendment No. 4478 to Amendment No. 4387

  Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
pending amendment be temporarily set aside so I may call up amendment 
No. 4478.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The clerk will report the amendment.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       The Senator from Washington [Mrs. Murray], for herself, Mr. 
     Schumer, Mr. Casey, and Mr. Brown, proposes an amendment 
     numbered 4478 to amendment No. 4387.

  Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of 
the amendment be dispensed with.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The amendment is as follows:

  (Purpose: To increase funding for housing counseling with an offset)

       At the appropriate place in the bill, insert:
       Sec.  . Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, 
     the amount appropriated under section 301(a) of this Act 
     shall be $3,900,000,000 and the amount appropriated under 
     section 401 of this Act shall be $200,000,000.

  Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, it is not my desire to debate this 
amendment at length at this time. I only

[[Page S2629]]

wanted to call it up so it will be available for the Senate to consider 
as we continue to debate this extremely important housing bill that is 
in front of us.
  Late last week, the Senate considered the question of additional 
funding for housing counseling. When the Senate voted on that matter, 
there were 16 Senators who were absent from the Chamber. So that 
amendment did fail at the time on a procedural vote. But I do believe 
some Senators may have voted against our initial amendment because it 
added funds to the overall cost of this bill. The new amendment I have 
just called up will add the necessary funding for housing counselors 
from within the funds already in the bill.
  Senator Schumer and I are going to be talking about this amendment in 
greater detail at the appropriate time. I think as we continue to try 
to address the housing issue, we all remember there are up to 2 million 
families who may go into foreclosure this year, and our main objective 
ought to be to make sure they do not go into foreclosure. That is what 
this housing counseling funding does. It is extremely important. I hope 
as we move this bill along we will be able to add the additional 
funding.
  Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.


                            Renewable Energy

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Madam President, over the last several weeks, a number 
of visitors have come to Capitol Hill urging us to support renewable 
energy. There is a lot of interest in this country for so-called 
renewable energy. The idea is for us to be less dependent on energy 
that is shipped from other parts of the world. Some of those places are 
unfriendly to us.
  A number of us are also very concerned about climate change, and we 
would like cleaner energy. Renewable energy is usually cleaner energy. 
Some of us, as I do, live in parts of the country where clean air is a 
problem. We have coal plants that produce sulfur and nitrogen, and now 
we have become more concerned about mercury, so we are interested in 
clean air. So if there is some way to find new sources of renewable 
energy which can help our country have cleaner air, deal with climate 
change, and be less dependent on other countries, that would be a 
terrific thing for the United States of America.
  Senator Ensign and Senator Cantwell, the Senators from Nevada and 
Washington, have offered to the housing bill an amendment that would 
provide support for renewable energies. I would like to talk about the 
Ensign-Cantwell amendment No. 4419, and I hope I would be construed as 
talking about it in a friendly way. Because Mr. Kyl, the Senator from 
Arizona, and I have a proposal, amendment No. 4429, which we have 
already introduced that we believe would improve the Ensign-Cantwell 
amendment in support of renewable energies. I would like to talk about 
that amendment for a few minutes this evening.
  Today, the Federal support for renewable energy is basically in a 
piece of legislation called the renewable electricity production tax 
credit. That gives 2 cents or 1 cent for each kilowatt hour produced of 
renewable energy to a variety of emerging technologies.
  In summary, the Ensign-Cantwell amendment extends the production tax 
credit for 1 year in its current form, with the addition of wave and 
tidal as a qualified emerging technology. Senator Kyl and I propose to 
double the amount of time that the tax credit is extended from 1 year 
to 2 years to focus it more on emerging rather than proven 
technologies, to focus it on baseload technologies--that is to say 
technologies that will produce large amounts of reliable electricity 
around the clock and not just from time to time--and that would treat 
the various technologies the same, and it wouldn't cost any more than 
the estimated $6 billion or $7 billion over the next 10 years that the 
Ensign-Cantwell amendment would cost.
  So that is our goal: to extend from 1 year to 2 years the extension; 
to focus on emerging baseload technologies to treat wind fairly, which 
has been the proven technology that has received most of the support to 
date; and not to spend more money than Senator Ensign and Senator 
Cantwell have proposed.
  Here is a picture of where we are today. The renewable electricity 
production tax credit began in 1992. As with many Government subsidies, 
in the early stages it was suggested that it would just be there for a 
while until the technology was proven and then we would step back and 
let it flourish on its own in the marketplace. But the year 1992 was a 
long time ago.
  Here are the technologies that today get Federal support through the 
renewable electricity production tax credit. Getting 2 cents per 
kilowatt hour are closed-loop biomass, which is the burning of plant 
materials grown specifically for energy production; and geothermal, 
heat from underground. Solar received this support for several years, 
but it was removed in 2005 because this is a tax credit that focuses on 
energy produced, and most people who use solar power put panels on 
their roofs so they weren't really selling that power to the grid or to 
the utility company. So the solar manufacturers and others came to me, 
among others, and said this production tax credit isn't doing anything 
for them.
  In the Energy Policy Act of 2005, I was the sponsor of a proposal 
that increased the amount of Federal subsidy for the solar panels. Now, 
there is within the Federal law a separate provision that provides an 
investment tax credit for what appears to be a very promising idea 
called solar thermal powerplants. Instead of putting a panel on your 
roof, what you would have instead is a whole field full of mirrors that 
would then catch the Sun, turn it into steam, put the steam 
underground, and then you could use the steam as you need it to 
produce electricity.

  What people often forget about solar and wind energy is it is 
available when the Sun shines and when the wind blows, and that may not 
be when you want to turn your air-conditioning on or run your computer. 
The solar thermal plant has the potential of being a 50-megawatt plant 
or a 100-megawatt plant or a 500-megawatt plant. Solar thermal is 
beyond the experimental stage.
  I believe Pacific Gas and Electric on the west coast is putting in 
one 500-megawatt solar thermal plant. There may be another. If there 
can be solar thermal powerplants, that would be a tremendous addition 
to our arsenal of electricity-producing facilities in this country 
because most parts of America can benefit from solar power if the 
technology can catch the sunlight and we can store this solar energy. 
Basically, with solar and wind, you have always had to use it or lose 
it, and if the wind blew at midnight but your air-conditioner was on at 
5 o'clock, the wind power, or the solar power for that matter, was not 
of much value.
  So closed loop biomass, geothermal, and wind are receiving a tax 
credit of 2 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. These have 
been preferred. This is an example of the Government doing what I don't 
much like, along with many others on this side of the aisle, which is 
called picking and choosing technologies. I would rather see, if we are 
going to subsidize toward an objective, that we let the marketplace 
pick the technology. But we, in our wisdom, have said today biomass, 
geothermal, and wind get 2 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity 
produced and sold to a utility for distribution to customers.
  Now, over here on the 1-cent side, 1 cent per kilowatt hour had been 
and would, under the Ensign-Cantwell bill, continue to be open-loop 
biomass, small irrigation power, landfill gas, trash combustion--
Johnson City, TN, made a contract with a private company that takes its 
landfill trash and over the next number of years makes electricity from 
it and pays the city $1 million a year, which helps reduce property 
taxes. So that is promising. Also, qualified hydropower, about 7 
percent of our electricity in the United States comes from rivers and 
dams. It is small, new hydropower projects that are qualified to 
receive this tax credit. Wave and tidal facilities are interesting. In 
the East River in New York,

[[Page S2630]]

they are taking what amounts to be wind turbines and putting them under 
the water. There is more energy in the waves and in the rivers than 
there is in the air; in fact, so much that it broke the blades from the 
turbines and they are having to replace them, but at least there is 
energy there. We would subsidize that to the tune of 1 cent per 
kilowatt hour under the Ensign-Cantwell proposal.
  Here is the difference that Senator Kyl and I would make. We would 
move wind to the 1-cent per kilowatt-hour column. Why would we do that? 
Because wind is a proven technology. We know it works. Where the wind 
blows, such as in Texas and the Great Plains states, wind works. The 
electricity produced is competitive. Where it doesn't blow, such as on 
Buffalo Mountain in Tennessee--the Tennessee Valley Authority 
ratepayers are paying some big bill to developers in some other big 
city to put up a bunch of wind turbines on top of our mountaintops that 
only work 10 percent of the time in August when we need the electricity 
the most. So it may work in Minnesota and South Dakota, but it doesn't 
work in the foothills of Tennessee.
  So wind is a proven technology. We would like to focus more on 
technologies that have the capacity of becoming baseload technologies; 
that is, that might produce large amounts of electricity all day and 
all night if we needed it. Wind can't do that. Solar, until lately, 
hasn't been able to do that. But biomass, geothermal, irrigation power, 
landfill gas, trash combustion, hydropower, wave and tidal, all of 
those have a potential--a potential--to substitute for what we use 
today, which is primarily coal, nuclear power, and gas.
  So the Alexander-Kyl proposal would, for about the same amount of 
money, give 2 years of business certainty to those emerging renewable 
energy technologies. It would focus then on the emerging ones, not the 
proven ones. It would focus on those that have the capacity to produce 
baseload power. It would treat wind fairly because wind would still 
get, under our amendment, 2 years instead of 1; and wind would, based 
on my computation, get more of the Federal dollars than any other of 
the types of technology, and the extended tax credit would, as amended, 
cost about the same.
  Now, let me go to a picture of where our renewable electricity comes 
from today. This green line, this is wood, burning wood; bonfires, one 
might say. We call that biomass, I guess, in scientific terms. Biomass 
has consistently produced about 35 million Megawatt-hours of 
electricity over recent years. That is a fair amount of electricity. 
This is waste, such as the landfill at Johnson City, TN, that I was 
describing, where we take what we have disposed of and turn it into 
electricity. That is beginning to amount to something. Our waste is 
being burned to consistently generate about 15 million Megawatt-hours 
of electricity.
  The red line is geothermal. It is also consistently generating about 
15 million Megawatt-hours of electricity per year. I have seen some of 
these technologies. You drill deeply into the ground, and the heat 
comes up and you can use that on a regular basis.
  The yellow line is wind. We can see that it has increased rapidly 
since 1999. It has been the technology that has grown the most, 
although it is still less than 1 percent of all of the electricity that 
we produce. Then down here at the bottom is a blue line which is solar. 
The reason the solar is so small is because this represents electricity 
which is sold to the utilities; as we say, sold into the grid. Most 
people haven't sold their solar power into the grid. They have just put 
the panels on top of their houses or their businesses and used it when 
it was available to reduce their demand for electricity from the grid.
  Now, let me go to the larger overall picture of where our electricity 
comes from because if we are talking about a realistic use of limited 
dollars--and we do have limited dollars in the Federal Government--
sometimes it doesn't seem as though we know that. Where will we put 
those dollars? Ensign-Cantwell say let's add about $6 billion or $7 
billion toward this worthy goal of renewable energy.
  Well, let's look at the whole picture. This is where our electricity 
comes from today. We are not a desert island. The United States of 
America uses a lot of electricity, about 25 percent of all of the 
electricity in the world for about 5 percent of the people. That is the 
number of us who are Americans. How do we produce that electricity? 
Today, almost half of it is coal. Half of the electricity is coal. If 
coal disappeared, the lights would go off, the industries would stop, 
the computers would shut down, and there would be a revolution in our 
country. Forty-eight percent comes from coal.
  Next comes gas, natural gas. During the 1990s, almost all the new 
powerplants were natural gas. The advantage to that was they were 
predictable, and easy to build. Investors in utilities could make 
practical business decisions, and they were cleaner than coal in terms 
of nitrogen and sulfur and mercury and carbon. The problem is it drove 
the cost of natural gas from $2 a unit to--at one point in the last few 
years $14 or $15 a unit--and begin to drive almost all of the chemical 
industry jobs and many other manufacturing jobs out of the United 
States. It began to drive up the cost of farming so that many farmers 
have a hard time making a profit because natural gas is used to make 
fertilizer, and that drove up the cost of food to people who couldn't 
afford to pay more for it.
  So using natural gas increasingly for electricity is not a good idea 
for our country right now, particularly since the Congress the other 
day voted down my amendment by 52 to 47 to allow us to drill offshore 
for more natural gas so that we could increase the supply and reduce 
the price and reduce our dependence on foreign natural gas. So that is 
second. And third is nuclear power. Nineteen percent of all of our 
electricity in America comes from nuclear powerplants, which have the 
advantage of having no nitrogen, no sulfur, no mercury, and no carbon, 
if one is concerned about climate change. Then comes hydroelectric, 
which in 2007 produced 6 percent of our electricity in the United 
States. This is electricity from our rivers and the dams. There are 
even some parts of the United States where people want to take the dams 
out of the rivers for a variety of environmental reasons, which may be 
good reasons, but that will reduce one source of clean electricity. 
Then we get down to oil, petroleum.

  Sometimes we get oil confused with electricity. We do not use much 
oil to make much electricity in this country. We use some natural gas. 
We use oil in automobiles for fuel, but we don't use it for 
electricity. Actually, it produces about the same amount of electricity 
as all the renewable technologies put together. Wood is less than 1 
percent; waste is half of 1 percent; geothermal, half of 1 percent; 
solar is not sold into the grid; wind is not even 1 percent. The point 
is, the renewables are less than 3 percent of the electricity we use.
  We live in not only a big economy but a growing economy. The 
Tennessee Valley Authority, in the area where I live, in 7 States, has 
said to me they need 700 more megawatts of electricity every year 
during this next few years. The Dominion Power Company, which is 
Virginia, I read in the Washington Post the other day, is estimating 
they need 400 more megawatts. Madam President, 700 megawatts is more 
than one gas plant or more than one coal plant or a little more than 
half of a nuclear powerplant, which today takes 8 or 10 years to build. 
We not only use a lot of electricity, primarily produced from coal, 
nuclear, and gas, and very little from renewables, but it is growing, 
and if it doesn't grow, our incomes will go down and we will not enjoy 
that same high standard of living.
  I know, having been a Governor, when I was recruiting Nissan to come 
to Tennessee and Saturn to come to Tennessee--now one-third of our 
manufacturing jobs in Tennessee are automotive jobs, and we have nearly 
1,000 suppliers of auto parts in Tennessee--one of the most important 
items in our favor after location and a right-to-work law is the supply 
of large amounts of reliable, low-cost, clean electricity because that 
is not available everywhere in the United States and certainly not 
everywhere in the world.
  This is the picture of where we get our electricity and what we are 
talking about in the Ensign-Cantwell amendment. The amendment Senator 
Kyl and I have is to increase this renewable electricity from about 3 
percent of all the electricity we produce to something a little higher. 
But in the next 10

[[Page S2631]]

or 12 years, it is not going to be a lot higher. It will be somewhat 
higher, and we hope we stumble upon something that will make a big 
difference. Even though, for example, wind has been around and heavily 
subsidized since 1992, it is still only eight-tenths of 1 percent of 
all the electricity produced in the United States.
  The only difference in this next chart title is the word ``clean.'' 
We care about clean really for three reasons: nitrogen, sulfur, and 
mercury. Federal ozone standards were stiffened recently. That means 
Knoxville, Chattanooga, Memphis, and cities in our region have to work 
harder to have cleaner air to meet those standards because a lot of the 
dirty air comes in from other parts of the United States which have 
dirty plants, mainly coal plants.
  The clean electricity, which we prefer--and this is the reason the 
TVA is now focused on nuclear production--is 69 percent nuclear. That 
is an important figure for anyone who cares about clean air and climate 
change. Nearly 70 percent of all the clean electricity produced in the 
United States today is nuclear power; 21 percent of it is 
hydroelectric. There are not going to be more dams on rivers. And this 
little bit here, which all adds up to about 8 or 10 percent, is 
renewable energy. So if you care about climate change and if you care 
about clean air in this generation or in the next 10 years, you better 
look at nuclear or hydroelectric. Hydroelectric will not grow rapidly 
because there are not going to be a lot more dams, or we better be 
realistic about renewable or look at one other area, which would be 
conservation.
  What have we done with our money? We have tried to focus, so we say, 
on renewable energy. I noticed in the debates here people talk about 
all the different kinds of renewable energy. The fact is, almost all of 
our investment has gone to wind. This, I imagine, would startle most 
Senators to know, that over the next 10 years, we are already committed 
to spending $11 billion subsidizing wind power although it produces 
less than 1 percent of our electricity and it does not produce it when 
we need it, it does it when the wind blows. But we have proven we can 
produce electricity from time-to-time when the wind blows. We have 
large amounts of huge turbines that are going up around the country, 
some in our most scenic areas, which in some parts of America are 
providing useful power, but at what cost?
  This is a recent report that I asked for and just received this week 
from the Energy Information Administration where I asked: How much are 
we spending of the Federal taxpayers' dollars to subsidize the 
electricity we are using in this country?
  Remember, coal produces about half the electricity we are using at 
this minute in the United States of America--44 cents per megawatt 
hour. Refined coal, which is a very small part of coal, is a very 
expensive subsidy--at this moment, the biggest Federal subsidy for 
electricity. For natural gas, almost nothing, a quarter per megawatt 
hour; nuclear, $1.59 per megawatt hour; biomass, 89 cents; geothermal, 
less than a dollar; hydroelectric, two-thirds of a dollar; solar, $24 
per megawatt hour for Federal subsidies of electric power. This is a 
little misleading because, as I mentioned earlier, almost no one sells 
electricity today into the electric grid. That is all this represents. 
If you had extra electricity from the panels on your roof and you sold 
it to the local power company, that is what this would be. Only few 
people do that today.

  In the future, we may have solar thermal plants. Wind we have quite a 
bit of, and we spent $23.37 per megawatt hour actually produced for 
wind. Landfill gas, $1.37; municipal solid waste, 13 cents; all 
renewables average $2.80, and all sources, $1.65.
  I would argue wind is over subsidized, that we are not making the 
wisest use of our Federal dollars when we take a proven technology and 
spend $24 per megawatt hour and we starve a lot of the other emerging 
technologies and we ignore what we are spending for the ones on which 
we rely.
  For example, we spend $24 per Megawatt hour for wind and $1.59 for 
nuclear. Nuclear produces 70 percent of our clean electricity. Wind 
produces about 2 percent of our clean electricity. If we were 
subsidizing nuclear power at the rate we subsidize wind, we would be 
spending $340 billion over the next 10 years for nuclear power. No one 
is proposing we do that. It would not be a wise expenditure even though 
it is a working technology that today provides most of our power, and 
if we are going to deal with climate change in a new generation, we 
would have more nuclear power.
  I am doing this to show how disproportionate our renewable energy 
subsidies have become.
  Coal provides half of our electricity. We have two problems with 
coal: one is it has too much of three pollutants--nitrogen, mercury, 
and sulfur--and the other is carbon. We can get the nitrogen, sulfur, 
and mercury out of coal almost entirely. So would it not be better to 
spend some of this money on coal and have clean air or to spend some of 
this money on investing in the recapture of carbon from coal plants so 
they can be operated cleanly?
  One of the major environmental organizations has a coal solution for 
climate change because it knows China is producing two new dirty coal 
plants a week, and unless we invent a clean way to use coal, which 
means also getting rid of the carbon, then the rest of the world will 
not use it. If we do it, they will do it also or they will suffocate. 
If they do not do it, we will soon suffocate because the air blows all 
around the world and comes back to Los Angeles and then Wichita and 
then to Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis as well.
  This list of federal subsidies of electric power from the Energy 
Information Administration is a very revealing chart. It would suggest 
that at the very least, what we might do with a proven technology, 
wind, which is competitive where the wind blows and not competitive, 
obviously, where it doesn't, is take some of that money and focus it on 
some of the other emerging technologies which have been starved over 
the last 15 years because wind has gobbled up most of the money, and 
these new technologies have a capacity for being baseload technologies.
  The solar thermal powerplant is a very good example. If it works for 
the Pacific Gas & Electric company, I bet you the Tennessee Valley 
Authority, within a short period of time, will start building it for 
reliable power plants. Why would they do that? Because last summer, in 
the middle of our drought, when we were all sweating and the rivers had 
run dry and lakes had run dry and our air-conditioners were turned up, 
the TVA had to go out and buy 6,000 or 7,000 megawatts of electricity. 
What did they buy? They bought natural gas because it was all that was 
available. They were paying--and I know my numbers are going to be a 
little off here--they were paying in the neighborhood of $78 or $80 per 
Megawatt hour for natural gas as compared to $2 per Megawatt hour for 
electricity from their hydro plants. They badly need some other form of 
clean energy.
  Why spend 2 cents per kilowatt hour on wind when we can still 
subsidize wind generously at 1 cent per kilowatt hour and release 
enough money to extend to 2 years the length of the subsidy for other 
emerging technologies?
  Just to be specific, the percentage of the renewable electricity 
production tax credit that goes for wind energy is 75 percent. In other 
words, 75 percent of all the money we give to renewable energies goes 
to wind. It does not go in meaningful amounts to this broad list of 
renewable technologies. Over a 10-year period, from fiscal year 2007 to 
2016, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, in a letter they 
wrote to me in May of 2007, we are committed to spend $11.5 billion, 
and the Ensign-Cantwell amendment would add another couple billion 
dollars to that. So we would be spending $13 billion or $14 billion for 
wind even though we are subsidizing at a rate of $24 per megawatt hour.
  Senator Bingaman, the chairman of the Energy Committee, said in the 
debate on the Energy bill in 2007 that wind will receive about 76 
percent of the production tax credit subsidy over the next 10 years. 
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, in another report, wind 
energy is estimated to be 74 percent of that, and it is projected to 
grow as a percentage of the total production tax credit.
  What we are doing is increasing our support for a technology that is 
proven, that is not reliable enough to be used for baseload or for 
peaking because it only works when the wind

[[Page S2632]]

blows, you cannot store it, and it is already over subsidized by a 
massive amount compared to every form of electricity.
  The largest single Federal tax expenditure for electricity over the 
next 5 years is the renewable production tax credit, and 75 percent of 
that goes to one proven technology, wind, which is competitive where 
the wind blows, not competitive where it does not, is not reliable for 
baseload, and is not reliable for peaking. That is not being good 
stewards of the Federal taxpayers' dollars at a time when we really do 
need to encourage renewable electricity and we need to deal with 
climate change and with clean air.
  I have just a couple more points.
  As one might suspect, when you are subsidizing something at $24 per 
Megawatt hour as compared to $1.50 for nuclear and 25 cents for natural 
gas, you get a big surge in wind capacity. That is what happened during 
the period of the subsidy. Even with this rapid growth, wind produced 
2.7 percent of our clean electricity, of only 0.8 percent of all our 
electricity. And as I have mentioned several times, wind energy is not 
reliable. You can't store it. It is not produced when you are likely to 
need it most.

  Another limitation on wind power is it is not available everywhere in 
the United States. There are some parts of the United States where wind 
power works fine, and there are some Members of the Senate who love to 
advocate wind power. You can see where those are. It is where the wind 
blows down from the North, and it blows on a reliable basis. So you can 
put up wind, and particularly if you are paying $24 per Megawatt hour 
to subsidize it, you are going to find a lot of investors in Chicago 
and New York and around this country that can make a big buck off 
putting wind up here where it is competitive and where they do not need 
the subsidy, or putting it down here where the wind doesn't blow, and 
they apparently get enough subsidy anyway. You may say: Well, if they 
only get paid when the wind blows, how do they make any money? Well, we 
have all kinds of tax subsidies for wind, and the production tax credit 
is one, but there are a number of other subsidies that I am looking for 
right now. There are subsidies in agriculture. There is the clean 
renewable energy bonds--the Federal Government. Those can help build 
the wind turbines. There is the Department of Energy grant incentive 
programs for renewable energy production. In the farm bill, there will 
be some renewable energy and energy-efficient grants and loans. Thirty-
three million dollars of that goes to wind. There are a variety of 
State subsidies for wind. Twenty-four States have enacted renewable 
portfolio standards.
  We have gotten all excited about renewable energy, which is a good 
thing, but what we have forgotten to do to be careful to encourage a 
wide variety of forms of renewable energy, so that we can have reliable 
energy that has the capacity to be used as a base load or peak load.
  Then there is the other limitation that affects some people and 
doesn't affect others. Here is the Buffalo Mountain wind project in 
Tennessee. This is the only wind farm in the Southeastern United 
States. It is the only one the Tennessee Valley Authority has. There 
are 18 of these turbines here. They are tall and they are white. They 
are about twice as tall as the sky boxes in the football stadium at the 
University of Tennessee.
  Now the Senator from Michigan will smile at that, because Michigan 
and Tennessee have, for years, had a little friendly competition going 
about who has the largest stadium. We are up to about 107 thousand on a 
Saturday afternoon, and I think the University of Michigan is at 1,010 
or 1,011 people. So they are a little ahead of us now. But to 
visualize, each of those stadiums have these large sky boxes, and each 
of these towers is twice as large as those sky boxes. Each one has 
blades extending from the goal line to opposite goal line. They are 
white, and they have flashing lights so you can see them from 20 miles 
away during the day.
  We are paying $24 per megawatt hour to subsidize that all over the 
country--only 25 cents an hour for natural gas--in a place where the 
wind doesn't blow. Last August, during the drought, that farm was 
operating at 10 percent. So it doesn't work there very well.
  My argument is for realism. I would like to see us have a realistic 
policy. I would like to have clean air and deal with climate change not 
only in this generation but in the next 10 years. To the extent we need 
to do that with electricity, we need to look first at conservation.
  The Tennessee Valley Authority operates at about 27,000 megawatts on 
the average, but every night it has about 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 or 10,000 
megawatts of idle capacity. Now, some people remember how Ross Perot 
made his money. He noticed that in Texas, in the 1960s, the banks were 
closing at 5 and not using their computers. So he bought their time and 
came to the States and got a contract to manage Medicaid data, and he 
made a lot of money doing that. It is the same thing here. We have, in 
the TVA region, 7,000 or 8,000 megawatts of idle capacity at night. 
That is seven or eight nuclear power plants. That means we probably 
have 210,000 megawatts of idle nighttime electric capacity.
  We should be spending this $11 billion on smart meters that encourage 
people to buy electric cars and plug them in at night and use the idle 
capacity we have already built rather than paying $24 an hour for wind 
that is proven where it works and would not work where the wind doesn't 
blow. Or we should take some of that money, as I have suggested with 
Senator Kyl, and focus it on other emerging technologies. Wind has had 
its chance. It has done well and grown rapidly. Now, I see the majority 
leader, and I will be through momentarily, because I imagine he has a 
report to make about Senate business. So I will wind up in this way. 
What the Kyl-Alexander amendment would seek to do is to improve the 
Ensign-Cantwell proposal by extending from 1 year to 2 the length of 
the production tax credit extension by focusing it on emerging 
technologies, and by focusing it on base-load technologies. Our 
amendment would treat wind fairly by adding another billion dollars to 
the $11.5 billion we are already spending for less than 1 percent of 
our electricity on wind, and that would cost about the same.
  I hope our colleagues will consider the Alexander-Kyl amendment, No. 
4429, when the Ensign-Cantwell amendment is offered tomorrow.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Whitehouse). The majority leader.

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