Illustration: Tiffany Herring / Axios
House Republicans' energy agenda includes promoting quicker grid connections and ordering states to revisit regulations that lead to fossil-fuel plant closures.
Why it matters: House Energy and Commerce's slate of 14 bills unveiled Wednesday is the first substantial peek at lawmakers' plans to address soaring energy demand after several hearings on the issue.
- In seeking to carry out President Trump's energy dominance agenda, Republicans are leaning on fossil fuels while attacking wind and solar as unreliable.
Zoom in: One GOP bill would require state regulators to look at how reliable their energy supplies would be if utilities sold rising percentages of power generated from wind and solar.
- Those considerations could be applied to states' clean-energy standards and renewable portfolio standards mandating renewable use.
- Another bill would order state regulators to consider requiring utilities to analyze their "reliable generation portfolio" over a 10-year period.
- A third would allow companies five years to contest their power plants' retirements from service and require them to provide a five-year notice of any plant retirements.
Between the lines: But Republicans are confronting a tricky issue: State policies drive the electric generation mix.
- Rep. Troy Balderson's bill would prioritize dispatchable generation — power sources that can be quickly adjusted to meet electricity demand fluctuations — in federally overseen power-grid studies.
- But states still manage electricity generation planning — and blue states are likely to chafe at any GOP fossil-fuel mandates.
- Trump directed the Justice Department to target any state climate regulations that the administration views to have shut down coal.
Zoom out: The bills "represent an opportunity for this committee to refocus the federal government's approach to the energy sector," Bob Latta, chair of E&C's energy subcommittee, said at a hearing.
- "Misguided state actions are having an outsized impact," he said.
The other side: Democrats questioned how DOE layoffs and funding cuts and Republicans' targeting of IRA tax credits would slow energy buildout.
- Rep. Paul Tonko said the bills' definition of "reliable generation facility" — defined as having on-site fuel storage — is similar to language the DOE used for its doomed effort in Trump's first term to require FERC to prop up coal and nuclear plants.
- Politics under Trump have unnecessarily turned energy policy "into the Cowboys versus Eagles," pitting renewables against fossil fuels, said Rep. Marc Veasey.
What's next: Latta couldn't give a markup date for the bills.
- E&C is focused in the coming weeks on budget reconciliation and figuring out which pieces of Biden-era energy funding are available to claw back.
- "It's not all about health care — there are some energy pieces in [reconciliation] we're talking about," Balderson told Axios.
- "Even the IRA stuff, we're verifying that [to see] is that something that we can do," he added. "I hope by next week, we have something a little bit more focused."
