Thanks Warren, and thank you all for that warm welcome; and thank you most especially for the great work so many of you do back home in your state capitols to Advance America’s “new energy economy.”  I know Warren was instrumental in establishing the Texas Environmental Education Partnership, and we have a lot to learn from successes like these across the heartland.

I’m here to represent the Department of Energy of course, but more importantly to share our President’s vision and elaborate on the Administration’s specific goals for pursuing greater energy independence.

Whether we are talking about breaking America’s addiction to oil, accelerating market penetration of renewable energy technologies, or innovating strong state policies to cultivate new sources of domestic, clean energy and efficiency, energy security, economic security, and our environmental well-being are inextricably linked to our national aspirations of energy independence.

The Advanced Energy Initiative that President Bush unveiled during this year’s State of the Union Address lays the foundation of our national strategy to change the way we power our homes and offices and vehicles, and work to eliminate our unhealthy addiction to oil.

Take for example, the Biofuels Initiative, or ’30 by ’30, which seeks to displace 30 percent of gasoline consumption by 2030.  President Bush has set the ambitious goal that cellulosic ethanol should be commercial by 2012, and we are working steadily to that end.  We need milestones; deliverables.

This year alone, the United States surpassed Brazil as the world’s largest producer of ethanol, and we are growing new domestic alternative biorefinery capacity at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.  It is reasonable to expect that American farmers will, in the near future, supplant almost 10 percent of our gasoline usage, and so we are planning for even greater penetration of E85, hybrids, clean diesels, and eventually plug-in hybrids, and in all these efforts, coordination with state policymakers will be instrumental to implementation and the nation’s success. 

States have the opportunity to also exercise leadership in expanding use of alternative fuels in your state fleets by promoting the purchasing of flex-fuel vehicles in your state, which have little or no cost differential.

Above all, we will seek your help in growing and refueling the distribution infrastructure and creating greater push and market pull for domestic, alternative fuel stations and pumps.

After more than a quarter of a century of this nation aggressively investing in research and development of clean, green, domestic, abundant, and affordable sources of power generation and fuels, the time is now ripe to reap the harvest, and I am grateful to many state leaders who are aggressively seeking policies that integrate these technologies into our mainstream and into our lives.

The timing, in fact, could not be more opportune.  Our challenges are great and our solutions have to be greater. 

We are at war.  We have all been reminded again this week of the brutal intentions and the plotting in humanity, and incivility of a terrorist and fundamentalist enemy that would really leverage energy over our economic future, to the extent they have the opportunity to do so.

Our air quality and environment is at risk; we all aspire to address the concerns of a world that is incurring pollution and warming.

And we are increasingly engaged in the greatest global economic competition that our nation has yet known.  How we fare in it, will affect our children’s inheritance of an “American Dream” – a dream that you and I have the good fortune to experience every day.

Federal and state governments, nor the private sector, can be fully effective in addressing these challenges alone, in isolation of one another, and it is essential that we use creativity and agility to grow new forms of federal-state collaboration and public-private partnerships that rise to meet our national challenges with the urgency they merit.

Typical solutions being peddled are almost exclusively reliant on the heavy hand of policy from the federal government, and ignore jurisdictional respect and the efficacy of state-based solutions for the goal of accelerating market transformation. 

As you all know, formulating good policy at the state level has an enormously important role to play in being catalytic to capital investment in clean energy technologies and efficiency.  It is therefore important that state legislatures and governments and utility commissioners strengthen their role in attacking inefficiency and insidious waste that unnecessarily burdens our national economic competitiveness; and that you continue to collaborate closely with the federal government so that we may increasingly converge together in our efforts towards meeting our common objectives.

Many states have led the way in growing renewable sources of power generation and biofuels, in particular, at impressive rates since this Administration began six years ago.  Along the way, the most aggressive states have also attracted enormous investments in research and development and manufacturing, and job creation and witnesses new areas of economic growth on the back of clean energy technologies.

As the Governor of Texas, President Bush signed into law one of the nation’s most heralded Renewable Portfolio Standards, and along with one of the nation’s best policies for recovering rate-based transmission standards, Texas has emerged as a national leader with almost 10 percent of its generation coming from wind power alone. 

So it is no surprise to those in the know that the President is a great believer in what good state energy policy can do for the good of the nation. 

A few weeks ago, I testified before the Senate that I thought it would be positive if every state accounted for its available renewable resources, and sought to devise and pass into law a Renewable Portfolio Standard tailored to each state’s conditions and circumstances.  Although it is perhaps less simple for some to trust the states to act in their own interest in maximizing their clean energy resources, it is clear that beginning with a nation, one-size-fits-all approach would be more difficult and potentially more divisive from the outset. 

En route to planning such policies, many state leaders, legislators and energy officials have regularly availed themselves of the technical assistance provided by the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  This has been particularly true as we work to evaluate and strengthen building codes for the residential and commercial sectors.

I want to take this occasion to again offer you our firm support in stewarding your important dialogue amongst the states, utilizing the proven resources of our renowned national laboratories, and reconciling best practices for renewable portfolio standards, efficiency standards, and enhanced energy policy at the state level.

I invite you all to explore new forms of federal and state interaction with new urgency in the days and weeks ahead.  We can collaborate together with NCSL to prepare briefing materials for state legislators and their staff and support workshops or create case studies to assure that empirical data, lessons, and best practices are put forward for your decision-making. 

Importantly, we can and will support your efforts, when invited, with technical assistance to help analyze utility rate structures and the best potential for decoupling to align incentives between utilities and customers, and achieve maximum efficiency gain.

Decoupling is amongst the most important things you as legislators can do immediately to affect our nation’s energy balance, enhance our energy security, and alleviate price pressure for the citizens in your states.  By decoupling a utility’s sales from their revenues, you will encourage the greater use of distributed generation and increase the incentive for utilities to pursue energy efficiency, demand-side management and renewable energy.

Many states have already successfully moved in this direction and they should be applauded, but we all recognized that so much more can be achieved by aligning the interests of the private sector and citizenry at large on the same side of the table.

We will continue working with utilities and state legislators on the new options needed for utility rate structures that remove barriers and create incentives for energy efficiency.  The reality is that these utility investments and utility regulatory decisions are made at the state and local level all across the country and rightfully so.

DOE is a repository of significant experience that can be used by state utility commissioners across the country to meet local and regional needs, and it is our objective to responsibly share information in the interest of efficiency for all states and the aggregate good of the nation.

Many of the issues I have just elaborated upon, including an important new stress on decoupling, advanced metering, and optimized codes and standards are encompassed in the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency, which was unveiled with Administration support…with support from both the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, a few weeks ago in San Francisco.

It is supported by the colleagues many of you know from most of your respective Public Utility Commissions.  It is supported by both state regulators and the entities they regulate, including the nation’s gas and electric utilities, of all kinds: munis, coops, public power and investor-owned utilities.  It is supported by more than 80 organizations, making impressive, durable and balanced commitments to energy efficiency.

And this morning, at the very important gathering, on behalf of the President and Secretary Bodman, I want to personally call on each and every one of you to take your part in its growing success and have your state openly support these policy recommendations for creating a sustainable, aggressive national commitment to energy efficiency delivered by gas and electric utilities.

Specifically, you can initiate legislation and pass resolutions on half of your state to endorse and support and fortify the National Action Plan for Energy Efficiency and become instrumental in realizing its goals. 

This is a prime example of how an unprecedented level of public-private partnership and federal-state cooperation is needed now more than every.

We already have a “Task Agreement” in place and are working well together with NCSL to systematically support legislative education and awareness, of the Nation Action Plan, but please use these days to better define how we could collaborate further, and inspire what you can do to make this nation more secure and affect our energy balance in the near term. 

In the realm of education, consider all the good we can achieve with immediacy and for future generations with a massive expansion of “Energy Smart Schools,” which is at the center of our communities.  Together, we can continue to work with citizens, state officials, school administrators, architects, and contractors to make our education facilities a model of energy efficiency, environmental quality, and as importantly, a “real-time,” real world educational tool for our kids.

All the while, state procurement has the power to catalyze and stimulate the market for Energy Savings Performance Contracts, building integrated solar panels and other smart energy technologies and green building practices that are reasonably mature and presently cost-effective for public procurement.

Of course, in this day and age, one must consider the value of externalities.  Doing so may support compliance with your state’s clean air requirements, by leveraging efficiency and renewable energy technology potentially as a part of an abatement strategy.

In this regard, I am hopeful that we can work together to make important strides in creating a more robust national market and a “common currency” for interstate trading of “RECS” or Renewable Energy Certificates, that were born through state legislation.

And of course, an externality that weights so particularly heavy on us all these days, is assuring our homeland security needs, with domestic, reliable, redundant, secure, agile and uninterruptible sources of energy, which only renewable energy can provide.

I am delighted that you will have the opportunity to hear from Secretary Chertoff on this subject.  And I am pleased to report that interagency convergence on energy security is a high priority for us at the Department and within the Administration.

As you evaluate this year, and in the future years, the highest and best use for the state funds and homeland security dollars at your disposal, I beg that you consider more than purely “reactive” strategy for expenditure and investment.

To be clear, there is simply no greater risks in the event of a homeland security event, whether natural or man-made, than the risks associated from protracted outages of power and disruptions of energy supply and fuel logistics.

While we can and should plan to react well in the fact of the worst homeland security threats, we also have the opportunity, and I believe a duty, to invest increasingly in pre-empting disruptions, and fortifying solutions on the front end, so as to avoid the incredible harm to home and health and communities that have already witnessed in Louisiana, Mississippi and all along the Gulf Coast.

America’s natural, renewable resources and efficiency measures are so abundant and readily available and cost-effective that your significant focus and attention on state policies for grid integration, demand response, and advanced metering would surely be a catalyst for localized job growth and new forms of localize economic integration and alleviating price pressure and this is an important source of Washington’s interest in your success.

I say “your” success, as if it belongs exclusively to us gathered in this hall, but the ramifications of truly doing this job ambitiously, doing this job right in your state capitols, go well beyond our state and national agendas.  And I commend you for including broader global perspectives in your agenda.

Despite all the doubters, do not underestimate the effectiveness and potential for America’s market-based, bottom-up, federated approach, however unwieldy it may seem at times.

We regularly demonstrate profitability and growth from not only diligently “doing” things right, but from demonstrating the America’s leaders like you understand the “right thing to do.”

Of course, we also have it in our hands to do something less; to get trapped by static thinking or recurring, chronic patterns of policy debate in a fast-moving and dynamic global development environment; to aim too low, to limit our vision, to bemoan our dilemmas, rather than fix them, or to compromise our potential. 

I trust that you will work together with us and that you will legislate and lead on these issues, as if our country’s energy future, standard of living, economic and environmental well being, and national security depended on it.

Because arguably, it does.

It is essential that all levels of government understand their jurisdictional boundaries of course, and yet we must maximize our efforts within them.  It is essential too that we reach beyond our boundaries with new forms of collaboration and embrace counterparts across the public/private divide and across government; and engage people of all professions, people of all parties, people of goodwill, to come together in the great tradition of our nation in a time of need, and aggressively seek to bring the future forward.

This Sunday, my daughter Jenny just turned two.  Her middle name is “Faith” and in no small part, it reminds me at meetings like of the faith I have that when she is old enough to understand what you and I were doing here to do our part and move the needle, that we can reflect about a time when America found itself in strenuous global competition, in the wake of the largest attacks our homeland suffered, and in the midst of a world that is warming, we decided to come together and take on these enormous challenges…and together, we made a vigorous start. 

Thank you very much for having me.

Location:
Nashville, TN

Media contact(s):
Julie Ruggiero, (202) 586-4940