VIDEO: Heinrich Joins Press Conference Blasting Republicans’ 'Big Beautiful Betrayal’ for Raising Energy Prices
Heinrich on Trump’s reconciliation bill: “The impact is electricity bills are going up”
WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Senators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ranking Member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, joined Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) in a press conference on how Trump and Republicans' reconciliation bill will raise energy costs for working families, all to pay for tax handouts for their billionaire donors.
Heinrich’s remarks as delivered are below:
As Senator Schatz said, the conundrum we're in with electricity right now is that we haven't been in this supply demand space since air conditioners became a widely available technology.
That was the last time we saw the kind of growth in demand that we're experiencing right now. On the supply side, the place we find ourselves in right now is one where, if you want to order a combined cycle of natural gas turbine, if you ordered it yesterday, you're going to get it in 2030 or 2031.
If you want to build a new API, 1000 Nuclear Generating Station, as the President has said he does, it's going to take you 5 to 10 years to actually build that.
If you want to do the geothermal stuff that's taking off in Utah, to some extent in New Mexico, that's scaling slow: It's going to be 5 to 10 years before that stuff is at scale.
So if you look at this incredibly increased demand from artificial intelligence, from electrification, from the surge we've seen in manufacturing, and you look at the supply that's coming onto the grid in 2024 and what's coming on in 2025 well over 90% of that is actually renewables plus storage.
And that's the case because it's the cheapest, fastest to permit and fastest to build.
So if you start throttling back 90% of your supply at a time when demand is going through the roof, what's the impact of that?
And I'm here to tell you, the impact is electricity bills are going up.
They are going up all across the country.
And Republicans are going to own that because there is no world in which we throttle supply like they are doing right now, especially with this reconciliation bill, but in 5 or 10 other different ways as well, and you don't see those electric bills go through the roof.
IRA tax credits are the biggest piece of that but it's not the only one.
They basically eviscerated the agencies that finance or permit many of these things.
They said they wanted to build nuclear.
The only nuclear that's been built in the last 30 years is what we just saw happen in Georgia, and that happened because the loan program office — where they've lost half the staff and defunded it in the president's budget.
If you want to produce oil and gas, you need somebody at the Bureau of Land Management who can actually pick up the phone about a permit.
They have chased people out of the Bureau of Land Management.
You add that to the kind of permitting abuse that we've seen with Empire Wind, a fully permitted multi-gigawatt project, and then you throw in some steel and aluminum tariffs just to make the natural gas projects that are in the books even more expensive.
This is a perfect storm of higher electricity rates, and if they pass this reconciliation bill without changes, they're going to own every bit of it.
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