[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 59 (Wednesday, April 22, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4528-S4529]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             ENERGY POLICY

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today is Earth Day, a day of 
celebration of the environment and the landscape of the great American 
outdoors. The President is on his way to Iowa to visit a windmill 
factory.
  It is also a good day for us in the Senate to ask, ``exactly what is 
our energy policy in the United States and what should it be?'' Is it a 
national clean energy policy; or is it a national renewable energy 
policy; or is it a national windmill policy? It makes a difference. 
Because in terms of electricity, we use about a quarter of all the 
electricity in the world, and our computers and our homes in the summer 
and winter and our factories all depend upon a generous supply of 
reliable, low-cost electricity. That is what we need.
  I believe this is our policy, and I believe most on the Republican 
side believe this as well, and I hope many on the other side do too. I 
believe that what we should do for the foreseeable future is to produce 
American energy, and use less energy, and that we ought to do it as 
cleanly as possible, as reliably as possible, and at as low a cost as 
possible.
  Let's see if that is what we are actually doing and if that is what 
the legislation we are considering would actually do. Nothing has 
captured the media's attention, nor the attention of those of us who 
are elected to office, quite so much as renewable energy. I heard the 
Presiding Officer make what I believe was his maiden speech on the 
floor of the Senate on this subject not long ago. And the President of 
the United States--President Obama--has talked about powering our 
electricity by capturing the energy of the Sun, and the wind, and the 
Earth.
  We will be considering, within a few weeks, legislation that would 
require all our electric utilities to generate a portion of their 
electricity from a very narrowly defined group of energies--mostly the 
Sun, the wind, and the Earth--and we have huge subsidies, especially 
for windmills--billions of dollars by taxpayers. That is the subject of 
another speech, but last year we added another $13 billion or $14 
billion in subsidies over the next 10 years that we would be giving to 
banks and wealthy people and others who are wind developers.

  The total number is in the $25 billion to $26 billion in taxpayer 
money that is now going just to subsidize wind turbines. The subsidies 
are huge. As a country, we have gotten infatuated with energy from the 
Sun, the wind, and the Earth.
  I went to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory a year ago and talked 
about the importance of a clean energy future for our country, and 
among the suggestions I made was that we have a new Manhattan Project 
(like the World War II project that created the atom bomb), or a series 
of mini Manhattan Projects, and that they would be directed toward such 
things as making solar cost competitive within 5 years. Solar energy 
costs three or four times as much as other energies, so the technology 
needs to be improved. Also, we should make advanced biofuels more of a 
reality. In other words, making fuel from crops that we don't eat so we 
don't distort the food market.
  We have made some progress on renewable energy, but there is a 
potentially dangerous energy gap facing us in America because, today, 
renewable energy from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth produces 1\1/2\ 
percent of all the electricity we use. The President wants to double 
that. Well, that is 3 percent. What if we tripled it? Well, that is on 
up to 5 or 6 or 7 percent. What about the other 90 percent? How are we 
going to heat our homes and cool our homes and how are we going to keep 
prices low enough so our factories and jobs will stay here rather than 
going overseas? It will be a long time before electricity or energy 
from the Sun and the wind and the Earth can power this big country of 
ours. There will be a gap between the renewable energy we want and the 
reliable, low-cost energy we must have.
  Congressman Heath Shuler of North Carolina and I are co-chairs of the 
Tennessee Valley Authority Congressional Caucus. We went to Knoxville 
last week and held a very interesting forum on the renewable energy 
options in the Tennessee Valley Authority area. One of the two big 
plants that make polysilicon, which is essential for solar, provided 
testimony. We are very glad to see that in Tennessee. But each of those 
plants uses 120 megawatts of power. They will become almost immediately 
TVA's largest, or among their largest, customers. They need large 
amounts of low-cost, reliable electricity to make solar panels. Today, 
of course, the kind of energy President Obama wants to use only 
produces 1.5 percent of that needed by the United States. We need low-
cost electricity for all jobs, not just green jobs.
  Here is what we found that was promising--solar especially. I 
mentioned it cost a lot more today and that it takes up a whole large 
area. A nuclear powerplant might take up one square mile. The 
equivalent amount of solar power might take up 10 times that much area. 
But nevertheless, our State and the Oak Ridge Laboratory and the 
University of Tennessee are focused on doing our best to try to make 
solar cost competitive, and we should redouble that effort in this 
country. We should be spending our money on energy research and 
development for that purpose.
  For example, we heard about underwater river turbines. The Federal 
Energy Regulatory Commission says there may be 30,000 megawatts of 
electricity that could be produced by turbines in the Mississippi 
River. That would be pretty good, if it works, because the river runs 
all the time, unlike the Sun, which only produces energy when the Sun 
shines. Of course, you can't store energy from the Sun. People overlook 
that sometimes. You have to use it when it happens. The wind often 
blows at night, when we don't need it. But the river runs all day 
long--old man river does--and if it can produce that kind of energy, 
that would be promising.
  Biomass may help. The Southern Companies are building a plant that 
would have about 100 megawatts. In our part of the world, a bad choice 
would be wind turbines. We have one wind plant. The problem with it is, 
No. 1, the wind doesn't blow, at least not enough to make much 
electricity. It blows 18 percent of the time in the case of TVA's one 
wind farm--the only wind farm in the southeastern United States.
  Second, much of that is at night, when TVA has about seven nuclear 
powerplants worth of electricity that is unused. So TVA is wasting, in 
my opinion, $60 million on big wind turbines that it could be spending 
on conservation, nuclear power, and pollution control equipment.
  More than anything else, we do not want to see giant, 500-foot wind 
turbines on top of the most beautiful mountains, we believe--with all 
respect to the Senator from New Mexico--the

[[Page S4529]]

most beautiful mountains at least in the eastern part of the United 
States. Boone Pickens was asked if he was going to put wind turbines on 
his ranch? He said: No, they are ugly. If they are too ugly for his 
ranch then they are too ugly for the Great Smokey Mountains, and they 
are the wrong choice for us. Solar? Yes. Underwater turbines? Yes. 
Biomass? Yes. There may be others, but there are good choices and there 
are bad choices.
  The bridge to the future for clean energy means this. While we do all 
we can on research and development to find a way to make solar cost 
competitive, to find a way to create advanced biofuels, we are still 
going to need a lot of power. Based on what we saw in the TVA region, 
you could start with conservation. We use 143 percent of the national 
average, per person, of electricity in Tennessee. We waste a lot of 
electricity. If we just used the national average, that would be the 
same as four new nuclear plants, five coal plants the size of Bull Run 
and nine natural gas plants such as the ones TVA is building in 
Jackson. So we start with conservation.
  If we are talking about fuel, the simplest and easiest thing to do on 
Earth Day is to recognize we could electrify half of our cars and 
trucks in America--that might take 20 years--but without building one 
single new powerplant, not one nuclear plant, not one coal plant, not 
one windmill on a mountaintop. We don't have to do that because, in 
TVA's case, they have 6,000 or 7,000 megawatts of unused electricity at 
night when we are all asleep and the factories are not working. So plug 
your car in at night at cheaper rates, bring in a lot less oil from 
overseas, save billions of dollars. That would take care of us for the 
next 20 years. That would be a smart decision to make on Earth Day.
  But the other thing we need to do is recognize that, if we care about 
clean air, and especially if we are worried about global warming, as I 
am, that we have to take nuclear seriously. Nuclear plants in America 
produce only 20 percent of our electricity but they produce 70 percent 
of our carbon-free, mercury-free, nitrogen-free, sulfur-free 
electricity. Let me say that again. They are only 20 percent of our 
electricity but they are 70 percent of our clean electricity. So in the 
Tennessee region especially, we should not be wasting money on 
windmills where the wind doesn't blow and it desecrates the 
environment. We should be spending money on making coal plants cleaner 
through pollution control. We know how to do that, except for carbon. 
We should also build more nuclear plants and retire the dirtiest coal 
plants. That is the smart thing to do. And we should emphasize 
conservation.
  My point today is simply this. I think all of us want to make sure we 
have a stable energy future. A stable energy future means plenty of 
reliable, low-cost electricity so we can heat and cool our homes and 
keep our jobs from going overseas. And we want to make sure it is 
clean. So our goals should be to produce more American energy, to make 
us more energy independent by electrifying our cars, to make coal 
clean, and to use wind and solar when it is appropriate to do that. But 
if we truly want to make a difference, we should build 100 new nuclear 
powerplants in the next 20 years, at least five or six a year, because 
that is the best way to have clean air. That is the best way to have 
low costs. And we should launch another mini-Manhattan Project and 
reserve a Nobel Prize for the scientist who can get rid of the carbon 
from existing coal plants, because coal provides half our energy. We 
know what to do about nitrogen, mercury, and sulfur. But we have not 
figured out what to do about carbon. If we did, India would also do it, 
China would also do it, the rest of the world would do it, and we could 
have low-cost energy.
  I mention low cost because so often we talk about new forms of energy 
as if cost didn't matter. It matters to the executives who met with me 
yesterday from the TVA region. TVA's residential rates are low, 
relatively. But the industrial rates are not. If they are too high, 
those jobs move out of our region, maybe overseas. And last December 
the people in Nashville, our capital city, did not think the 
residential rates were so low because 10 percent of them said they were 
unable to pay their electric bill in December because it was too high.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator has 2 minutes 
remaining.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Thank you very much, Mr. President.
  So on Earth Day my suggestion is that, as we celebrate the day, we 
should ask what is our energy policy--Is it a national clean energy 
policy? Is it a national renewable energy policy? Is it a national 
windmill policy?--we should recognize there is a potentially dangerous 
gap between the renewable energy we want and the reliable low-cost 
energy we must have, and between now and then we must build a strong 
bridge to a clean energy future.
  We can agree on conservation, but during that time we will need 100 
new nuclear plants, we will need offshore drilling for oil, and fast, 
because we need the gas and we can't electrify all of our cars as 
quickly as we might like.
  Earth Day is a day for celebration, but it is also a day for realism.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois is 
recognized.

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