| June 4, 2009 |  |
Science Group to Senate Energy Committee: Reject Proposed Amendments that Would Hamstring the Nation's Renewable Energy Development
Strong Renewable Electricity Standard Is Achievable and Affordable
WASHINGTON (June 4, 2009) – The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today will take up an energy bill with several provisions that have the potential to boost the nation's energy efficiency and renewable energy generation. However, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the bill as currently written would spur much less renewable energy development than what the United States could affordably achieve. And, despite an already watered down bill, nearly three-quarters of the proposed 54 amendments would further weaken the legislation.
"When designed well, a renewables standard would diversify our energy mix, create jobs and reduce electricity and natural gas bills," said Marchant Wentworth, Washington representative for the UCS Clean Energy Program. "The current Senate bill fails to require utilities to go beyond business as usual. Amendments to further weaken the RES represent a death by a thousand cuts and would eviscerate the benefits the policy is designed to generate."
One of the primary components of the committee's energy bill is a national renewable electricity standard (RES), which would require utilities to obtain 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources, such as wind or biomass, by 2021. Utilities could meet as much as 4 percent of the requirement through energy efficiency programs. Due to various weak provisions already included in the proposal, UCS analysis shows that utilities would have to boost their renewables to between 8.1 and 10.9 percent by 2021. In comparison, the Department of Energy projects that current state policies and federal incentives would increase renewable energy to about 10.2 percent of total U.S. electricity generation by 2021.
In addition to requiring only a modest amount of renewable energy development, the RES proposal has a problematic loophole that would allow states to opt out of the requirement altogether. An alternative compliance payment (ACP) mechanism in most RES proposals allows utilities to opt out of their renewable development requirement by making an alternative payment that solely funds clean energy projects. The current Senate proposal, however, would expand how the ACP funds could be spent, allowing governors to recycle the ACP funds back to the utilities with no obligation to develop new renewable energy. This would allow utilities to transfer their alternative payments from one hand to the other—via the ACP fund and state governors—with no new renewable energy necessarily developed in the exchange. UCS calls on Sen. Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) to strip out the debilitating language.
40 PROPOSED AMENDMENTS WOULD GUT THE RENEWABLES STANDARD
Senate committee members have proposed 40 amendments that would further weaken the RES. The weakening amendments fall into roughly three categories, and UCS urges the committee to reject them all:
The first set of problem amendments would define nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants that capture and bury their carbon dioxide emissions as renewable energy sources. Neither of these are renewable sources of energy. The technology to capture coal plant pollution and bury it underground is still emerging and faces many challenges, including high costs and massive infrastructure needs. Additionally, mining and burning coal threatens public health, causes deadly accidents, blows off the tops of mountains to access coal seams, and destroys miles of streams and rivers with rubble. Defining carbon capture technology at coal plants as "renewable" energy would prevent the expansion of inherently cleaner, safer and more sustainable technologies such solar and wind power. And while nuclear power plants do not produce carbon dioxide, they pose catastrophic risks that other carbon-free energy sources do not, such as the threat of a massive radiation release from a plant meltdown or terrorist attack.
The second set of weakening amendments would allow utilities to meet a greater amount of the RES requirement with energy efficiency measures. While energy efficiency is an important part of a comprehensive strategy to reduce the nation's global warming pollution, energy efficiency and renewable energy development should work in tandem and not compete against each other if the United States is to meet necessary reduction targets. Furthermore, the aim of a renewable electricity standard is to diversify the nation's energy mix with cleaner sources. Allowing utilities to meet their requirement with energy efficiency would undercut that aim.
The third set of amendments would allow all existing hydropower, which accounts for roughly 80 percent of current U.S. renewable electricity generation, to receive free renewable electricity credits for the clean power it is already producing. Those credits would be sold to utilities to meet their RES requirement. If existing, well-established hydropower is allowed to receive and sell these credits, it would undermine the intent of the standard, which is to encourage new forms of renewable energy sources.
A STRONG RENEWABLE ELECTRICITY STANDARD IS ACHIEVABLE, AFFORDABLE
While the Senate committee appears poised to weaken an already flawed bill, three recent studies have concluded that the United States could aggressively ramp up renewable energy development with little to no impact on energy bills.
In May, for instance, the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory released an analysis showing that the three leading RES proposals in Congress would result in average national electricity prices fluctuations of less than 1 percent annually.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reached a similar conclusion in April using a different model and set of assumptions. That study analyzed a 25-percent-by-2025 standard included in the "American Clean Energy and Security Act," which recently passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The EIA found that through 2030, the standard's impact on cumulative electric and natural gas bills would range from a marginal increase of 0.2 percent ($8.4 billion) to a slight savings of 0.1 percent ($2.5 billion).
And in March, UCS released an analysis (Clean Energy, Green Jobs)—based on a modified, peer-reviewed version of the same model EIA used for its study—of a stronger 25-percent renewable standard, with no option to include efficiency to meet the requirement. The analysis found that ratepayers would save $64.3 billion on their electric and natural gas bills by 2025. Between 2010 and 2030, electric rates would be as much as 7.6 percent lower than they would be without the renewables standard.
"The Senate committee shouldn't squander this historic opportunity to pass a strong renewable electricity standard, a policy that is already working in 28 states," said Wentworth. "It's time that the Senate steps up and leads, and it can do that by resisting all attempts to further undermine this legislation and pass the strongest possible standard."
The Union of Concerned Scientists puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet's most pressing problems. Joining with citizens across the country, we combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future.
