House hearing focuses on modernizing Department of Energy
The House Energy & Commerce Committee convened a hearing on Tuesday focused on how best to modernize the Department of Energy (DOE) to ensure it can meet its national security, energy and economic security challenges.
The wide-ranging discussion included testimony from DOE officials, scientists, and policy experts on the present and future direction of the agency.
Fred Upton (R-MI), chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy, said in opening remarks the agency is in a stronger position due to the nation’s abundant energy resources. He also noted improvements to the DOE’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the agency’s strengthened emergency preparedness efforts needed for tackling energy supply disruptions.
But Upton and Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) both cited hurdles the agency must overcome.
“We are reaping the benefits of energy abundance, but legacy challenges remain, such as cleanup of Cold War sites and permanent disposal of nuclear waste. New risks have evolved, such as cyber security threats to the electric grid and managing and overseeing the modernization of our aging energy infrastructure,” Walden said in an opening statement.
The committee plans to review certain DOE authorizations, many of which expired more than a decade ago, to ensure proper program alignment, Walden said.
Upton cut right to a recurring theme in the discussions, asking Dan Brouillette, deputy secretary of DOE, about his working relationship with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency currently reviewing DOE funding. “Our relationship with Director (Mick) Mulvaney has been strong. We are fortunate to have him as an OMB director. We’re in active conversations with OMB; we have not completed the budget process,” Brouillette said.
While the DOE extolled the virtues of what it has accomplished through the contributions of the country’s 17 national laboratories, the committee members expressed concerns about the submitted budget that cuts funding to several popular programs including home weatherization and the setting of energy efficiency home appliance standards. Reducing money for future research into carbon sequestration and the efforts to bring small modular reactors to market were also cited as concerns.
Potential changes to the national lab system were also discussed, including the need to have 17 different labs and the possibility of consolidating some.
The complex relationship between DOE and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was another topic that garnered attention. The semi-autonomous NNSA was created by an act of Congress in 2000 and charged with the management and security of the nation’s nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation, and naval reactor programs.
Although there were questions about overlapping and sometimes unclear authority between the two agencies, Frank Klotz, DOE under secretary for Nuclear Security and administrator of the NNSA, said, “I think we have a very close working relationship. We had one under the previous administration. We certainly have one in this administration as well.”
Separately, a recent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ruling that rejected a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry to subsidize coal and nuclear plants aimed at providing a reliable base load power source was also noted during the hearing.
Brouillette said, “The point of that rule was not to pick winners or losers or to subsidize certain forms of energy. In some cases it wasn’t the DOE asking but the people who actually run the grid.”
Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) posed a question about the agency’s position on reducing greenhouse gases. Under Secretary of Energy Mark Menezes responded by saying, “We’re looking at fuels that can be produced at the front end to lower emissions during the actual combustion process itself and then post combustion capture and sequestration.”
Meanwhile, the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program received high marks for its battery research that is designed to take the world beyond lithium, but its future is also in budgetary peril.
Congressman Mike Doyle, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, asked about budget requests that reduced expenditures on energy reliability by 40 percent and a 55 percent cut on a program to research clean coal. “We’re going to work with OMB to find an appropriate number,” Brouillette said.
Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) pressed the panel on the political football of reopening the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, which would be the final resting place of nuclear waste from the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL) then followed by reminding the officials that “in Puerto Rico over 40 percent of electricity customers have been without power for about four months,” and that more funds were needed to build an enhanced grid.
Menezes noted that as of Jan. 6, 80.8 percent of the peak load was restored and 60 percent of Puerto Rico customers are now with power.
