[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 9 (Tuesday, January 13, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S178-S179]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              ENERGY COSTS

  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for 
his leadership and his clarity, and I want to underscore one of the 
most basic points that has to be made. And this is how times have 
changed.
  We have changed what we are talking about because energy systems 
change, prices change, needs change, and the load changes. Right? But 
hearing the Senator from Kansas, it could have been 1998 or 2008 or 
2018. It is the same talking points, and it is literally not true 
anymore.
  There was a time when you could actually credibly say: Look, I 
understand there is a planetary emergency. But coal is so cheap. People 
are struggling. We have to balance the planetary emergency with the 
need for people to be able to cool and heat their homes and keep their 
lights on and all the rest of it.
  All of that is out the window. Why? Because clean is cheap and cheap 
is clean. Clean energy is now the cheapest kind of electricity that we 
can get on the grid in any kind of reasonable timeframe.
  There was a time where it was coal. That is definitely more expensive 
now. There was a time where it was gas, but the cost of gas keeps going 
up and up and up, for a couple of reasons--because we are exporting a 
lot of our gas but also because the turbines needed to convert natural 
gas into electrons--there is a huge backlog of them.
  So we have an industrial renaissance happening in certain States, and 
we have all of this AI data center load coming up, and we have your 
normal American economy stuff happening. There are not enough electrons 
on the grid.
  What happens when there is not enough of something? The people 
selling that thing raise the price. And that is exactly what is 
happening.
  That is not a rhetorical flourish. Like, they have overnight prices. 
They have people whose job it is to find how we are going to meet 
everybody's needs, so when you flick that switch, everything just 
works. There are technicians in front of probably three or four screens 
figuring out ``OK. I am going to buy this. This is the overnight price. 
This is the backup,'' all that.
  What has changed over the last couple of years is that solar energy 
is it. Even if you don't care at all about the climate, you should 
still love solar energy. Why? Because nobody should be enthused about 
paying more for electricity.
  What Donald Trump has done is very unique in American history, maybe 
even in world history--I am not too sure. It is normal for a President 
of the United States to try to alleviate economic pain for the citizens 
of the United States, and this is certainly the first President that I 
have experienced in the U.S. Senate but honestly the first President 
that I have even been aware of who is intentionally raising the price 
of something that we all need.
  It is Secretary Burgum's order, and it is the way Secretary Wright is 
behaving, and it is the way Lee Zeldin is behaving, and it is the way 
people in the White House are behaving. They want to create a shortage 
of electricity. Why? First, they have ideology against solar and wind. 
Trump has a particular idea about wind and golf courses and birds or 
whatever. But they viewed, 10 years ago, solar as a kind of ideological 
project, as like a nice to have, United Nations, utopian view of the 
world.
  Well, listen, solar is the most pragmatic thing we can put on the 
grid. Solar is really the only thing that is ready quickly. Why? 
Because nuclear energy has tremendous potential but is at least an 8- 
to 12-year timeframe, so we are talking about the 2030s. Geothermal 
also has tremendous potential, but they have not worked out all of the 
technical issues. And again, that is really a 2030 to 2040 play.
  In the short run, we have a shortage. In the short run, we have a 
shortage, and Donald Trump is making it worse. Now, why would you make 
it worse? Well, when there are shortages of something, the people 
selling the thing get to charge more, and they are charging more.
  So you, as the consumer--and again, I care deeply about this 
planetary crisis. It is actually the main reason I am in the U.S. 
Senate. I care deeply about this. But even if you don't, nobody wants 
to pay more than necessary on their electricity bills, and this 
national solar ban is making everybody pay more.
  One in four Americans struggles to pay their electricity bills--one 
in four Americans. So what is Trump doing about it? Well, it is 
definitely worse than nothing.

[[Page S179]]

  The criticism about Biden during the inflation crisis was that he 
wasn't doing enough about inflation, but this is a different criticism. 
This is deliberate policy choices to drive up the cost of something 
that everybody needs.
  By the way, that is also true for food and health insurance and 
electricity. All the stuff you need, he is creating a shortage of. Why? 
Because when there are shortages, people have to petition the King for 
mercy, and that is what is going on right now.
  If you are close to him, if you can get dinner with him at Mar-a-
Lago, you can get relief. There is enough money in the system for lots 
of people to get wealthy, but there is not enough money for a regular 
person living in Kaimuki, Honolulu, already paying three or four times 
the average electricity rate, paying more and more and more because 
there is a national policy driven by the President of the United States 
to create a shortage of electrons because he has decided that climate 
action is against his interests.
  I think, if we are going to move forward on permitting reform but if 
we are going to move forward more generally on the question of 
affordability, we have to say that shortages are bad for prices. When 
there is not enough of something, people charge too much, and right 
now, we need as many electrons on the grid as we can possibly get, 
which means we need interstate transmission, and we need to not just 
permit new projects but at a minimum let the projects that have been 
almost totally built be plugged into the grid.
  So this is not a climate speech; this is a ``people can't afford 
their electricity bills'' speech. And I just hope some of my Republican 
colleagues understand they have to abandon their old talking points 
because they don't apply anymore.
  Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Might the Senator be willing to retain the floor for 
a moment to yield for a question?
  Mr. SCHATZ. Yes. I would be pleased to yield for a question through 
the Chair.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. In Rhode Island, we have a grid. ISO New England it 
is called. It is through that grid that electrons get from powerplant 
to the grid and from the grid to people's homes, and it is run as a 
basically common utility.
  I assume Hawaii, which is geographically quite distinct, has its own 
grid.
  So on our grid, this Revolution Wind project, as I said, is going to 
come on at 9 cents per kilowatt hour into a market where the prevailing 
rate is 18 cents. So if President Trump and his minions at Interior and 
EPW and Energy can stop that plant, they are making Rhode Islanders, 
New Englanders, buy 18-cent power instead of 9-cent power. So that 
raises the price for everybody.
  By the way, for those of you who are listening, the ISO grid, like 
almost all the others--the price at any given minute on the grid for 
electricity is set by the highest cost plant that has to operate to 
meet that level of demand. So if you can get that 9-cent cost to be the 
highest cost, that is it for everybody, but if you got to go back to 
18, that is also it for everybody. That plant just doesn't raise costs 
to pay itself back; it raises grid costs for every electron that is 
running at that same time.
  So what that produces is, sticking with the 9- and 18-cent example, 
the 18-cent cost comes out of ratepayers' pockets. They have to pay 
their electric bill at 18 cents. They could have paid only 9 cents; 
instead, they are going to pay 18. The difference is going to go to the 
fossil fuel industry, to the big donors of Trump.
  I call this a scam that Trump and his minions, for their big fossil 
fuel donors, are deliberately holding clean energy off the grid, which 
is cheaper, so that the grid can't go to it, has to go to higher and 
higher cost fossil fuel plants, so consumer costs go up. But that 
additional money that consumers have to pay goes to the fossil fuel 
industry, which gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected, 
and this is payback for them.
  Only Trump is no fool. Why pay it back himself or ask his political 
supporters to pay it back when he can go to electric consumers and bury 
it in their bill and make consumers pay to send hundreds of millions of 
dollars to these big donors.
  So that is what we see in New England.
  On the Hawaii grid, how does this work also?
  Mr. SCHATZ. Well, our grid is different, obviously, because we have a 
series of islands, and they are kind of self-contained grids. But our 
challenge is, to meet the load, we need electrons. And we do the 
dirtiest and most expensive thing, which is to light low-sulfur fuel 
oil on fire to create electrons. That is just north of like, you know, 
wood-burning stoves in terms of its efficiency. It is not a good way to 
do it economically, and it is not a good way to do it in terms of 
climate impact.
  So the Hawaiian Electric Company has a bunch of clean-energy projects 
on the grid because we have--the net capacity factors for our wind 
project on land are comparable to offshore wind. That is how much the 
wind blows in parts of essentially Maui and Hawaii Island. The southern 
part of Hawaii Island is incredible. People don't believe the numbers 
until they go down there and measure them. It is as if it is an 
offshore wind platform, but it is land-based. So we have ample 
resources to power our grid.
  When I was a kid in the Hawaii Legislature, I still remember the 
Hawaiian Electric Company would come and testify and say: The maximum 
penetration of renewables onto the grid is 15 percent. After that, you 
get power quality problems.
  By the way, that was true when that person studied electrical 
engineering in the seventies. That was actually true. The person wasn't 
lying. It is just that we have figured out a lot of this. It is not 
that we don't continue to need dispatchable power or baseload power; it 
is that grids are getting really, really smart and capable of handling 
high penetration of intermittent renewable energy. And when you layer 
them on top of each other, they are no longer functionally 
intermittent.
  So I kind of was like--I am sort of like from the future, right, 
because 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was cheaper for us to move in 
the direction of clean energy in Hawaii, but you couldn't say that on 
the continental United States side. And we moved in that direction as 
fast as we possibly could and tried to provide some measure of relief 
for ratepayers.
  But now what is going to happen is we are going to have to buy a 
bunch of electrons in the most expensive fashion. We are the most 
isolated majorly populated place on the planet, and everybody pays more 
for everything, and now electricity bills are going to go up because of 
the OBBA.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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