Congressional Support For Federal Renewable Energy Standard
The chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee said Tuesday that there is now enough congressional support to pass legislation requiring utilities to generate a portion of their electricity from solar, wind and other renewable sources.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the energy committee’s chairman, made his remarks following a hearing on draft legislation that would establish a national renewable electricity standard.Â
Such a standard would help achieve President Barack Obama’s goal to double renewable energy production over the next three years.
Under the draft bill, the amount of the U.S. electricity supply originating from renewable energy sources would be set at 4 percent in 2011-12, 8 percent in 2013-15, 12 percent in 2016-18, 16 percent in 2019-20 and 20 percent in 2021-39.
“I think that the votes are present in the Senate to pass a renewable electricity standard. I think that they are present in the House,” said Senator Bingaman.
“I think that we need to get on with figuring out what we can pass and move forward.”
Qualifying renewable sources would include solar, wind, ocean currents and waves, biomass, geothermal, landfill gas and incremental hydropower.
Setting a renewable electricity standard would reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels that run power plants, and would reduce those facilities’ emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming, said Bingaman.
“This standard would also spur the development of a national green energy economy, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, many in rural areas,” he added.
However, regulators and power companies in the southern U.S., where coal is a widely used source of electricity, generally oppose a federal renewable energy standard. They argue instead that not all states have abundant renewable energy resources.
A federal renewable standard “fails to recognize that there are significant differences among the states in terms of available and cost-effective renewable energy resources, and that having such a standard in energy legislation will ultimately increase consumers’ electricity bills,” David Wright, commissioner of the South Carolina Public Service Commission, told Reuters.
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