Heinrich Forecasts Major Job Creation, Clean Energy Economy Boost During Event With New Mexico Solar Energy Association

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is optimistic about New Mexico’s clean energy future that will create thousands of careers and bring in economic investments, opportunity across the state. 

During an event with the New Mexico Solar Energy Association today, Senator Heinrich said that the “clean energy economy represents one of New Mexico’s greatest opportunities to attract billions of dollars of private capital and create thousands of careers in every corner of our state.” 

Senator Heinrich’s full remarks as prepared for delivery are below: 

Hi everyone. 

Thank you so much to Dr. Ghosh and the entire New Mexico Solar Energy Association for inviting me today. 

I can’t wait to discuss the state of New Mexico’s clean energy economy and the exciting prospects for climate policy in the new Congress. 

My interest in photovoltaics started in the early 1990s. 

At the time, I was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Missouri-Columbia and I was part of the university’s solar car team. 

We designed a carbon fiber solar car called the Sun Tiger that we raced from Dallas all the way up to Minneapolis. 

That experience really opened my eyes to the possibilities for solar energy generation and energy efficiency as well. 

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I have had rooftop solar on my house in Albuquerque since the early 2000s. 

Today’s clean energy economy represents one of New Mexico’s greatest opportunities to attract billions of dollars of private capital and create thousands of careers in every corner of our state. 

Throughout my time serving in both the House and Senate, and even back to my days on the Albuquerque City Council, I have focused my attention on how we can advance investments in research, development, and the deployment of clean energy technologies. 

Both to grow this industry in New Mexico and to meet the climate crisis that threatens our land and water resources head on. 

I am proud that one of my first votes in Congress was on the 2009 Recovery Act that kick started the tax incentives that have grown the renewables industry and brought down prices to where solar is now the cheapest form of energy on the grid. 

In 2015, and again at the end of last year, I was proud to secure extensions of these clean energy tax credits that have proven to be one of our most successful federal tools for encouraging the construction of new renewables projects. 

The year-end agreement we reached in December included:

• A one-year extension of the Production Tax Credit for on-shore wind projects,
• A new five-year expansion of the PTC for offshore wind projects,
• And a two-year extension for the Investment Tax Credits for residential and commercial solar.
• It also included refridgerents language that will prevent ½ a degree C of additional warming.

In addition, I am continuing to build on this concept with bipartisan legislation that I just reintroduced with Senator Susan Collins to extend the investment tax credit to energy storage.

Deploying more energy storage is absolutely essential to reach the clean energy penetration on our grid that we’ll need as we transition to a zero-carbon economy. 

Over the last few years, storage technology has come down in cost dramatically. 

Storage also provides a whole host of services to the grid. 

The Energy Storage Tax Incentive and Deployment Act would supercharge the deployment of storage on our grid and would apply to both distributed and utility scale applications. 

In a few years I expect that most rooftop solar installs will be paired with on-site storage. 

As we scale up the use of new battery and other storage technologies, and encourage new utility scale wind and solar projects to be wind-plus-storage and solar-plus-storage projects we can drive down energy costs and enhance resilience and reliability for consumers. 

Our new Storage ITC bill follows the successful passage of the Better Energy Storage Technology—or BEST—Act last year. 

That new law will greatly accelerate research and development and implementation of energy storage systems. 

That last part is key. 

Especially as President Joe Biden and members of Congress begin to look for the best ways to put Americans back to work through a 21st century Build Back Better infrastructure package, I strongly believe that we need to place substantive climate action and the deployment of clean and carbon-free infrastructure at the top of the list. 

Modernizing America’s infrastructure for the 21st century necessarily means preparing for and adapting to the new climate reality. 

And it means opportunities for new high-quality careers in the building trades. 

That work includes preparing our roads, water systems, and energy infrastructure for the extreme weather events like we just witnessed in Texas. 

We also need to build more charging stations for the growing number of electric vehicles on our roads—while we simultaneously ramp up efforts to electrify our government vehicle fleets. 

On that note, we should be thinking through how we can incentivize more businesses and homeowners to electrify not just their vehicles, but also their water heaters, their gas-range stoves, and their furnaces. 

In short, one of the key strategies to solve the climate crisis is the electrification of nearly everything we do with combustion today. 

By electrifying our economy, including the buildings where we live and work, we can improve our quality of life and dramatically reduce health risks related to indoor air quality. 

The inherent efficiency of electric solutions means we can solve climate change much faster than my colleagues believe and we can save money and grow jobs doing it. 

Jobs installing solar panels, jobs for plumbers installing heat pump water heaters, jobs manufacturing wind turbines, jobs in construction, job maintaining generation facilities. 

High quality jobs in the trades. 

Millions of them. 

We should also be investing in the development and demonstration of carbon free hydrogen technology to create feedstock for some of our most heat intensive industrial processes. 

These types of technologies and alternative fuels may be the key to solving decarbonization for sectors of our economy that can’t be electrified, at least today. 

Finally, we need to focus on what we need to do to site and build more transmission lines and smart grid technologies that allow more power on the existing transmission infrastructure. 

Transmission is the infrastructure that has the potential to truly reshape and modernize our electric grid. 

New transmission lines, like the Western Spirit Transmission line that broke ground in New Mexico earlier this year, will literally change the map of our energy landscape. 

They create new pathways that will allow much more renewable, carbon-free power generation to reach energy-hungry markets. 

That one small transmission line alone will create 1,000 construction jobs—and dozens of permanent careers in rural communities in central New Mexico that haven’t seen this kind of local investment since the railroad came to town. 

And, once it is online, it will allow us to build four new wind projects that together will make up the largest single-phase wind development in American history—right here in New Mexico. 

That is what it looks like for New Mexico to lead in the clean energy economy. 

But it will take concerted communication and policy efforts from the federal—and even especially to the state and local level—to transition our economy fast enough to meet our emission requirements. 

I say requirements because these aren’t goals. 

This is physics. 

If we blow past 2 degrees C, we risk destroying the stable planet that has given rise to our civilization. 

Before we turn to questions, I would like to close by emphasizing just how proud I am of how New Mexico is leading in transition. 

This transition will not be easy. 

And it won’t come without costs—particularly for many of our fellow New Mexicans who have long worked to power our economy and supported their families with careers in traditional fossil fuel industries. 

I am grateful to those hard-working New Mexicans and even as we pursue this transition, it’s critical that we do not these workers behind. 

I was proud to see the New Mexico Legislature pass not only the Energy Transition Act last year but the Climate Solutions Act in the most recent Session to make sure we are planning for the future with clear eyes about both the challenges and the opportunities we face. 

And I am committed to working with leaders in our state and in the Biden Administration—including our new Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland and our new Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm—to develop place-based strategies and steer investments to support New Mexico’s transition. 

When I think about this, I always remember my father, who worked as an IBEW utility lineman. 

The wages and benefits he earned by maintaining power lines and keeping our community’s lights on put me and my sister through college. 

That job provided our family with a ticket to the middle class. 

It’s going to be blue collar energy workers like my dad who will be most impacted by this transition. 

But they can also be the tradesmen and tradeswomen who will build up our new clean energy economy.   

Despite the friction points that will come about as part of transforming of our economy—and in many cases because of them—there will be much work to do as we confront the climate crisis. 

So many of these new jobs are going to be—and in many cases already are—in our state’s booming solar industry. 

We have the potential to create 1000s more installing energy storage and changing out fossil-gas stoves, water heaters and furnaces with clean solutions like air source heat pumps and induction ranges. 

Our potential is clear. 

Our future is bright. 

If we make the right choices now, we have the opportunity to put New Mexico in the best possible position to thrive in the new energy landscape. 

Thank you.