Date: 2013-05-22
Speaker: GENE GREEN (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker. I rise today in strong support of H.R. 271. the Resolving Environmental and Grid Reliability Conflicts Act. Im proud to be an original cosponsor to this bill that we worked on with my good friends. Congressman PETE OLSON and Congressman MIKE DOYLE. last Congress. This bipartisan legislation addresses a conflict in Federal law where a company or individual can be held liable for violating environmental laws when the Federal Government orders them to generate power to avoid blackouts. Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act gives the Department of Energy the authority to order an electric generating facility to generate power in order to avoid an electric reliability emergency. At the same time. the possibility of violating environmental laws and regulations may restrict the operation of power plants or transmission lines. For example. a company may have mothballed a power plant because it had reached its Clean Air Act emissions limit for the year. So if a company. or publicly owned utility. is ordered by DOE to operate under section 202(c). and at the same time is prohibited from operating in accordance with the DOE order due to environmental limitations. the operator must choose which legal mandate to follow. These conflicting legal mandates should not complicate an electric reliability crisis. but they do. It is not fair for the government to put a power generator in this position. As a longtime member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and someone who has worked on both reliability and environmental legislation during that time. I can honestly say that it was never our intention to put electric generating facilities in the position of having to choose between compliance with one law over another. And while there have only been a couple of instances to date where a generator has been in this situation. this potential for conflict will only grow as several coalfired plants are scheduled to be taken offline in the coming years. That is why Congress needs to address this issue. Otherwise. we risk threatening our electric reliability and for certain regions of the country. this issue is coming fast. H.R. 271 simply clarifies that if an emergency order issued pursuant to section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act may result in a conflict with an environmental law or regulation. the order shall expire no later than 90 days after issuance. This deadline does two things. First. this ensures that the Department of Energy continues to have the necessary authority to "keep the lights on" in true emergencies. However. it then gives DOE the opportunity to renew or reissue the order for an additional 90day period only after consulting with the appropriate Federal agencies and including conditions submitted by these agencies to mitigate any potential adverse environmental impacts. This is not a messaging bill. Its not an antiEPA bill or an antiair toxic standards bill. Instead. its a commonsense bill that addresses a very worrisome deficiency in current law that is only going to become more prominent in the coming years. I want to thank our ranking member.