At a conference at the University of Chicago on Tuesday, Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) expressed his concerns with BAAJA (S. 5653), particularly in the real-world context of rising data-center demand, a lawless Trump administration, economic headwinds for the renewable industry, and preparations for rapid acceleration of natural gas extraction and infrastructure.
Interviewed by Axios reporter Amy Harder, Casten stated he could “not yet” support the bill, particularly as it could “create a gold rush for gas.”
“Anybody who is telling you that they can model the effects of this bill is telling you what their opinion is,” Casten warned. “They’re not telling you facts because when you have a White House that is not obeying the law, I don’t know how to model a change in law.”
Watch:
Full transcript:
Q: Congressman Casten, do you support the bill?CASTEN: Not yet. I think it’s got a lot of really good provisions. My test for the bill is, I talk to developers and say…once an energy developer, always an energy developer… “What would you build in response to this bill?”
And the answer I get overwhelmingly is a lot of gas.
And I think you have to look at the bill in the context of everything else that the Trump administration has done. First off, I think anybody who is telling you that they can model the effects of this bill is telling you what their opinion is. They’re not telling you facts because when you have a White House that is not obeying the law, I don’t know how to model a change in law.
And so you’ve got a world right now that I wish wasn’t true, but the Orsteds of the world are not putting more money down to develop new offshore wind because they’d had the leases taken from them.
You’ve got a bunch of solar developers—and Tim [Pawlenty, CEO of SEIA], please correct me if I’ve got this wrong on your end but a whole lot of solar developers who are rushing to deploy before the ITC cliff ends, but are also looking at dramatically increased costs because of some of the foreign entity of concern provisions that came in the the Big Ugly Bill which is dramatically raising the cost of solar deployment in the US, and a fairly disastrous fiscal policy that’s driving up the cost of bonds. Most of the cost of clean energy is capital recovery. Most of the cost of fossil industry energy is paying for fossil fuel.
So you layer on top of that that the United States is building a ton of data centers, is building a ton of LNG export facilities, is building a ton of gas pipelines. We’re able to permit those, right? And you’ve also got the gas turbine industry that’s now ramping up capacity to build more gas turbines, which is going to dial back on some of those bottlenecks.
And so I have a real concern that if we have issues exogenous to this bill that are causing us to hit a cliff on solar and wind and the gas industry preparing to build more, and frankly a lot of disruption in the solar and wind industry in the United States right now. This bill needs to be written for the moment we’re in.
We’re talking with with Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich about trying to change some of the some of the provisions that essentially would effectively bake in some of the penalties. There’s provisions that says that you can’t claim that you’re being mistreated unless you’re being treated differently than you have been over the last five years. Well, that five years is going to roll in four years of the Trump administration. And so there’s pieces that need to be fixed so you don’t permanently hurt that. And then I think also there’s some real opportunities, and I’m hopeful we can get this done to say…
Q: Get it done in before the next Congress?
CASTEN: No, no, we’re we’re talking with them right now. There’s a manager’s amendment coming. We haven’t seen the manager’s amendment yet. Let’s add some provisions that change the incentives so that you can… we’ve got this Surge Act that Mike Levin and I have done that says if a utility is helping to decongest their notice, bringing down the cost, let’s allow them to earn a little more return on equity, so that they’re so that they’re partners in the success of the consumers, instead of us mandating you act against your best interest.
So, I think the structure of the bill is good. I think there are modest changes we could make to it to make sure it works and doesn’t create a gold rush for gas. I don’t think it’s there yet, but I’m hopeful we can get there.
Q: But it sounds like you would need to see some changes before supporting the bill.
CASTEN: Yeah. And again, there is a manager’s amendment coming. So the text we’re looking at right now, we know is not the final text.