The GOP’s leading clean energy evangelist said Tuesday that Republicans are evolving in their support of low-carbon energy, while conceding that one reason may be the money he is putting into key Senate races.
“I think a lot of these issues are evolving, the electorate is evolving and the candidates are evolving” with them, said Jay Faison, who heads the clean energy group ClearPath and its super PAC.
He told reporters Tuesday that the GOP is playing catch up on green energy issues, which they have been slow to embrace. Faison has been endorsing Republican down-ballot candidates and funding ad campaigns touting their support for clean energy. He said to expect more endorsements this fall.
When Faison talks about clean energy, he does not mean solar and wind. Faison’s group supports a strategy that backs nuclear power plants, coal plants with carbon capture technology, hydroelectric power, natural gas-fired power plants and research and development. Wind and solar have a small niche but aren’t competitive without subsidies and do not provide 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week electricity. Nuclear, coal, hydro and natural gas do.
Faison said he has been meeting with dozens of Republicans on Capitol Hill and has found “a lot to agree on, and at least something to agree on in every office I’ve been at,” he said. “They love us.”
“I get a lot of thank yous. If you spend millions of dollars for Republicans, you get a lot of thanks yous. It’s not hard to gain popularity when you’re supporting the party,” he said.
As for Republican nominee Donald Trump coming around to clean energy, Faison told the Washington Examiner that he is still “waiting to hear more … from Donald Trump and his campaign on promoting and expanding our conservative clean energy agenda.”
Trump, in answering a questionnaire Tuesday from scientific groups, said he would support moving the country away from its use of fossil fuels in lieu of taking action to combat global warming.
“I’m an optimist and remain hopeful,” Faison said. He noted that Trump’s statement Tuesday is encouraging, especially when it comes to nuclear. Trump said nuclear energy “must be an integral part” of the nation’s energy mix, Faison noted. “But we at ClearPath continue to be focused on down-ballot races and Congress specifically to further our drive to improve the Republican Party’s platform on these important issues.”
Faison will testify Wednesday to a Senate Appropriations Committee panel on energy and water development focused on the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants.
He plans to recommend that the government back away from supporting unproven technologies and companies such as the bankrupt solar firm Solyndra, which was the focus of a high-profile scandal during President Obama’s first term after the government provided it with billions of dollars in loan guarantees.
He also will point to the problems and cost overruns associated with the clean coal program FutureGen, which was started under former President George W. Bush. Bush had canceled the program because of funding difficulties. Obama tried to jumpstart it, but to no avail. He also was forced to pull the plug over cost issues.
“We should learn from, and not repeat the mistakes of FutureGen or Solyndra — both recent examples of the government deciding to invest huge amounts of money into technologies with questionable commercial prospects,” Faison said in his Wednesday prepared remarks obtained by the Washington Examiner. Instead, Congress should focus on initiatives that “enable the private sector to develop their designs, remove regulatory roadblocks to enhance efficiency, create and maintain high-quality user facilities, and solve fundamental challenges.
“Recognizing that technology development benefits company profits as well as our energy system, industry cost-share must be part of the equation,” he said.
“We should stop funding tools and start funding outcomes,” where “research isn’t locked into programs that are deemed ineffective, and price and time targets help select efficient research pathways,” he said.
Faison also will pay considerable attention to the development of smaller, less expensive nuclear reactors that have been the focus of the Obama administration but have not been deployed. In the end, the reactors, which produce zero greenhouse gas emissions, will have a better payback for the public than solar and wind energy, according to his prepared remarks.
“Intermittent renewables such as wind and solar can be good additions to our energy supply,” he said. “But unlike other energy sources, as their system penetration increases, costs rise rather than fall due to the burden of compensating for their intermittency,” which means they only produce electricity when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.
“Greatly scaling up these intermittent resources requires expensive backup sources when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing,” Faison said. “Germany has shown what happens: it’s trying to both close its nuclear plants and dramatically increase solar and wind, a plan which has only raised electricity prices and increased reliance on inefficient lignite coal.”
His main point, however, will be that nuclear power remains the nation’s “most reliable clean energy source,” providing nearly 20 percent of the country’s electricity and representing 60 percent of the U.S.’s clean energy.
