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	<title> - LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE TEXAS BLACKOUTS: RESEARCH NEEDS FOR A SECURE AND RESILIENT GRID</title>
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	[House Hearing, 117 Congress]
	[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


	LESSONS LEARNED FROM
	THE TEXAS BLACKOUTS: RESEARCH NEEDS
	FOR A SECURE AND RESILIENT GRID

	=======================================================================

	HEARING

	BEFORE THE

	COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE,
	AND TECHNOLOGY
	HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

	ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS

	FIRST SESSION

	__________

	MARCH 18, 2021

	__________

	Serial No. 117-5

	__________

	Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology

	[GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


	Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov

	__________

	U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
	43-633PDF WASHINGTON : 2021

	-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


	COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY

	HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
	ZOE LOFGREN, California FRANK LUCAS, Oklahoma,
	SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon Ranking Member
	AMI BERA, California MO BROOKS, Alabama
	HALEY STEVENS, Michigan, BILL POSEY, Florida
	Vice Chair RANDY WEBER, Texas
	MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey BRIAN BABIN, Texas
	JAMAAL BOWMAN, New York ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
	BRAD SHERMAN, California MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
	ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado JAMES R. BAIRD, Indiana
	JERRY McNERNEY, California PETE SESSIONS, Texas
	PAUL TONKO, New York DANIEL WEBSTER, Florida
	BILL FOSTER, Illinois MIKE GARCIA, California
	DONALD NORCROSS, New Jersey STEPHANIE I. BICE, Oklahoma
	DON BEYER, Virginia YOUNG KIM, California
	CHARLIE CRIST, Florida RANDY FEENSTRA, Iowa
	SEAN CASTEN, Illinois JAKE LaTURNER, Kansas
	CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania CARLOS A. GIMENEZ, Florida
	DEBORAH ROSS, North Carolina JAY OBERNOLTE, California
	GWEN MOORE, Wisconsin PETER MEIJER, Michigan
	DAN KILDEE, Michigan VACANCY
	SUSAN WILD, Pennsylvania
	LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas
	VACANCY
	C O N T E N T S

	March 18, 2021

	Page

	Hearing Charter.................................................. 2

	Opening Statements

	Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman,
	Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
	Representatives................................................ 7
	Written Statement............................................ 8

	Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member,
	Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
	Representatives................................................ 9
	Written Statement............................................ 10

	Witnesses:

	Dr. Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and
	Aerospace Engineering, Andlinger Center for Energy and the
	Environment at Princeton University
	Oral Statement............................................... 12
	Written Statement............................................ 15

	Dr. Varun Rai, Associate Dean for Research; Professor of Public
	Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of
	Texas at Austin
	Oral Statement............................................... 32
	Written Statement............................................ 34

	Mr. Juan Torres, Associate Laboratory Director, Energy Systems
	Integration National Renewable Energy Laboratory
	Oral Statement............................................... 40
	Written Statement............................................ 42

	Ms. Beth Garza, Senior Fellow, R Street Institute
	Oral Statement............................................... 56
	Written Statement............................................ 58

	Dr. Sue Tierney, Senior Advisor, Analysis Group
	Oral Statement............................................... 69
	Written Statement............................................ 71

	Discussion....................................................... 91

	Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions

	Dr. Jesse Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and
	Aerospace Engineering, Andlinger Center for Energy and the
	Environment at Princeton University............................ 132

	Dr. Sue Tierney, Senior Advisor, Analysis Group.................. 136

	Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record

	Executive summary of a report submitted by Representative Sean
	Casten, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House
	of Representatives............................................. 140

	Documents submitted by Representative Bill Posey, Committee on
	Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 145

	Article submitted by Representative Bill Posey, Committee on
	Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 157

	Report submitted by Representative Brian Babin, Committee on
	Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 161


	LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE TEXAS
	BLACKOUTS: RESEARCH NEEDS
	FOR A SECURE AND RESILIENT GRID

	----------


	THURSDAY, MARCH 18, 2021

	House of Representatives,
	Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
	Washington, D.C.

	The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 o'clock a.m.,
	via Webex, Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson [Chairwoman of the
	Committee] presiding.
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chairwoman Johnson. And without objection, the Chair is
	authorized to declare recess at any time.
	Before I deliver my opening remarks, I want to note that
	Committee is meeting virtually, and I want to announce a couple
	of reminders to the Members about the conduct of the hearing.
	First, Members should keep their video feed on as long as they
	are present in the meeting. Members are responsible for their
	own microphones. Please also keep your microphones muted unless
	you are speaking. And finally, if Members have documents they
	wish to submit for the record, please email them to the
	Committee Clerk, whose email address was circulated prior to
	the meeting. These are our standard instructions, and I know
	we'll all cooperate.
	Just a month ago on Valentine's Day, Winter Storm Uri
	descended upon Texas and broke cold temperature records across
	the State. Forty-eight percent of the electricity generation
	capacity for the State grid went offline due to frozen
	components and frozen fuel supplies. By February the 16th, four
	million Texas households were without power. Millions of Texans
	had no heat and no electricity for three days or more with
	temperatures well below freezing. At least 70 people died as a
	result of Winter Storm Uri and these power outages. One of them
	was just 11 years old. Cristian Pineda died of hypothermia
	after electricity was cutoff in his family's mobile home in
	Conroe, Texas. He had been trying to stay warm under a pile of
	blankets with his three-year-old brother. An eight-year-old
	girl and her mother died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Harris
	County after they ran the family car to try to stay warm.
	The electricity and heating crisis led to a severe water
	crisis. Water pipes burst, flooding homes. By Friday the 19th,
	12 million Texans were under a boil water advisory because the
	water supplies had fallen too low. And all of this happened in
	the midst of the greatest public health crisis this country has
	seen in a century, when families are dealing with lost loved
	ones, lost jobs, illness, and isolation.
	I'm lucky enough to have lost power for just 1 day, and I
	kept warm overnight just by piling on blankets.
	Texans, Texans deserve better. There was a lot of
	discussion in the immediate aftermath of the Texas blackouts
	about who to blame. There was a lot of misinformation and
	political jockeying. What seems clear already is that Electric
	Reliability Council of Texas, better known as ERCOT, failed to
	prepare its energy infrastructure for extreme weather
	conditions. It is unacceptable that millions of Texans were
	left without power for days on end during one of the worst
	winter storms in our State's history.
	But I know there is more for us to examine about what
	happened in Texas, and it is our responsibility as policymakers
	to get answers. Why didn't the models used by the utilities see
	this coming? Which systems and components performed well and
	which failed? Could better demand response technologies have
	allowed the Texas grid operators to ease the burden of these
	charges and outages? What was the role of climate change in
	enabling the conditions for this extreme weather episode? How
	ready is the electricity sector for future extreme weather
	events like wildfires and heat waves? That's what I had thought
	we'd be looking forward to but not this type of winter. Will
	Texas be brought to its knees if our grid is attacked by a
	sophisticated adversary?
	If we can get a clear-eyed understanding of how these
	failures occurred, we can help prevent them from happening in
	the future. What Texans endured last month must not be in vain.
	We must learn from this episode and redouble our research
	efforts in support of a more reliable, resilient electricity
	sector.
	Last Congress, our fellow Committee Member, Mr. Bera of
	California, introduced a bipartisan bill with Mr. Weber of
	Texas to do just that called the Grid Security Research and
	Development Act. I understand he intends to reintroduce this
	bill this Congress, and I look forward to working with him and
	my other colleagues on both sides of the aisle for this
	important effort.
	Today, I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses,
	some of whom were also personally affected by power outages.
	These five panelists represent some of the foremost experts in
	electricity reliability in the country, and we are honored to
	have them with us today. I hope that as the Texas Legislature
	considers what to do in response to this crisis, they will heed
	the lessons that we all share with us today.
	[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]

	Just one month ago on Valentine's Day, Winter Storm Uri
	descended on Texas and broke cold temperature records across
	the state. Forty-eight percent of the electricity generation
	capacity for the Texas grid went offline due to frozen
	components and frozen fuel supplies. By February 16, four
	million Texas households were without power. Millions of Texans
	had no heat and no electricity for three days or more with
	temperatures well below freezing.
	At least 70 people died as a result of Winter Storm Uri and
	these power outages. One of them was just eleven years old.
	Cristian Peneda died of hypothermia after electricity was cut
	off in his family's mobile home in Conroe. He had been trying
	to stay warm under a pile of blankets with his three-year-old
	brother. An eight-year-old girl and her mother died of carbon
	monoxide poisoning in Harris County after they ran the family
	car to try to stay warm.
	And the electricity and heating crisis led to a severe
	water crisis. Water pipes burst, flooding homes. By Friday the
	19th, 12 million Texans were under a boil water advisory
	because the water supplies had fallen too low. And all of this
	happened in the midst of the greatest public health crisis this
	country has seen in a century, when families are dealing with
	lost loved ones, lost jobs, illness, and isolation.
	Texans deserve better.
	There was a lot of discussion in the immediate aftermath of
	the Texas blackouts about who to blame. There was a lot of
	misinformation and political jockeying, too. What seems clear
	already is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas,
	better known as ERCOT, failed to prepare its energy
	infrastructure for extreme weather conditions. It is
	unacceptable that millions of Texans were left without power
	for days on end during one of the worst winter storms in our
	state's history.
	But I know there is more for us to examine about what
	happened in Texas, and it is our responsibility as policymakers
	to get answers. Why didn't the models used by the utilities see
	this coming? Which systems and components performed well and
	which failed? Could better demand response technologies have
	allowed the Texas grid operators to ease the burden of these
	outages? What was the role of climate change in enabling the
	conditions for this extreme weather episode? How ready is the
	electricity sector for future extreme weather events, like
	wildfires and heat waves? Will Texas be brought to its knees if
	our grid is attacked by a sophisticated adversary?
	If we can get a clear-eyed understanding of how these
	failures occurred, we can help prevent them from happening in
	the future. What Texans endured last month must not be in vain.
	We must learn from this episode and redouble our research
	efforts in support of a more reliable and resilient electricity
	sector. Last Congress, my fellow Committee Member, Mr. Bera of
	California, introduced a bipartisan bill with Mr. Weber to do
	just that, called the Grid Security Research and Development
	Act. I understand he intends to re-introduce this bill this
	Congress, and I look forward to working with him and my other
	colleagues on both sides of the aisle on this important effort.
	Today, I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses,
	some of whom were also personally affected by power outages.
	These five panelists represent some of the foremost experts in
	electricity reliability in the country, and we are honored to
	have you with us. I hope that as the Texas legislature
	considers what to do in response to this crisis, they will heed
	the lessons that you all share with us today.
	I yield to Ranking Member Lucas.

	Chairwoman Johnson. I now recognize and yield to our
	Ranking Member, Mr. Lucas.
	Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this
	important and timely hearing.
	Today, we have an opportunity to examine last month's
	blackouts in Texas and other Southern and Midwestern States.
	There is no better time to hear about the ongoing efforts by
	industry, Federal agencies, and the Department of Energy (DOE)
	national labs to learn from these events and adapt for the
	future.
	Before we begin, I'd like to express my gratitude for the
	safety of my Texas friends here, and I hope your families are
	well, and your districts, like mine, are on their way to
	recovery.
	I'd also like to commend the public utilities and member-
	owned cooperatives in my State for how well they managed their
	crisis and ensure the safety of their customers and my
	constituents.
	Physical and cyber threats to our power grid are
	constantly evolving. This incident, alongside last year's
	wildfires on the West Coast and the recent solar winds cyber
	attack highlights the need for congressional action to ensure
	the security and resilience of the U.S. energy sector.
	As we discussed these events and their causes, we on the
	Science Committee have a responsibility to focus on the long-
	term technological solutions that can help us prepare for and
	respond to the next trial. As the past year has shown, it's not
	a matter of if our grid will be tested again, it's a matter of
	when. The Science Committee has jurisdiction over DOE's
	electricity delivery, cybersecurity, energy security, and
	emergency response research and development (R&D) activities.
	This work is essential to maintaining the stability and
	flexibility of our grid not just for today's needs but also for
	the next generation's.
	Through its world-leading national laboratories and Grid
	Modernization Laboratory Consortium, DOE supports R&D in
	advanced grid modeling, grid energy storage, information
	sharing, and advanced control systems. By partnering with
	industry DOE can provide stakeholders with critical expertise
	and enable the deployment of new grid security tools and
	technologies.
	This morning, we will hear from Beth Garza, a Senior
	Fellow at R Street's Energy and Environmental Policy Team. She
	served as the Director of the Electric Reliability Council
	(ERCOT) of Texas, known to all of us as ERCOT, Independent
	Marketing Monitor from 2014 through 2019. Beth brings a
	critical perspective to this distinguished witness panel and
	could provide first-hand insight into ERCOT and the power
	supply industry as a whole. I look forward to her testimony
	highlighting the needs and challenges of our diverse and
	complex power delivery system.
	This hearing also will serve as an opportunity to discuss
	grid security legislation. Last year, H.R. 5760, the Grid
	Security Research and Development Act, passed by the House with
	strong bipartisan support. This legislation authorized the DOE
	(Department of Energy) research, development, and demonstration
	(RD&D) activities that focus on the discovery of innovative
	tools and technologies for energy sector security and
	resilience. The provisions of this bill were originally a
	central component of the bipartisan and bicameral Energy Act of
	2020, which became law last Congress.
	Unfortunately, due to last-minute jurisdictional claims
	from outside Committees, this bill had to be removed from the
	Energy Act at the 11th hour. I am hopeful that we can work
	together to once again introduce and pass grid security
	legislation this session, preferably this year.
	The energy sector faces unique challenges that require
	institutional knowledge and data that only the Department of
	Energy can provide. DOE is responsible for energy-critical
	infrastructure, which includes electric power, oil, and natural
	gas. It also has authority over the cybersecurity of energy
	delivery systems. Providing DOE researchers and industry with
	the tools they need to ensure the long-term security and
	resilience of our electric grid should be something we can all
	agree on.
	This Congress, I will prioritize getting these provisions
	over the finish line, working with my friends on both sides of
	the aisle to get this done. I thank our witnesses today for
	their valuable testimony at such a critical time, and I look
	forward to a productive discussion about how Federal agencies
	can work with industry to deliver affordable power to American
	homes, businesses, and essential services.
	Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back the balance of my
	time.
	[The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]

	Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson for holding this important
	and timely hearing. Today, we have an opportunity to examine
	last month's blackouts in Texas and other southern and
	midwestern states. There is no better time to hear about the
	ongoing efforts by industry, federal agencies, and the
	Department of Energy national laboratories to learn from these
	events and adapt for the future.
	Before we begin, I'd like to express my gratitude for the
	safety of my Texas friends here. I hope that your families are
	well and your districts--like mine--are on their way to a full
	recovery.
	Physical and cyber threats to our power grid are constantly
	evolving. This incident, alongside last year's wildfires on the
	West Coast and the recent SolarWinds cyber- attack, highlights
	the need for Congressional action to ensure the security and
	resilience of the U.S. energy sector. As we discuss these
	events and their causes, we on the Science Committee have a
	responsibility to focus on the long-term technological
	solutions that can help us prepare for and respond to the next
	trial. As the past year has shown, it's not a matter of if our
	grid will be tested again, it's a matter of when.
	The Science Committee has jurisdiction over DOE's
	electricity delivery, cybersecurity, energy security, and
	emergency response research and development activities. This
	work is essential to maintaining the stability and flexibility
	of our grid, not just for today's needs but also for the next
	generation's.
	Through its world-leading national laboratories and Grid
	Modernization Laboratory Consortium, DOE supports R&D in
	advanced grid modeling, grid energy storage, information
	sharing, and advanced control systems. By partnering with
	industry, DOE can provide stakeholders with critical expertise
	and enable the deployment of new grid security tools and
	technologies.
	This morning, we will hear from Beth Garza, a senior fellow
	with R Street's Energy & Environmental Policy Team. She served
	as director of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas
	(ERCOT) Independent Market Monitor from 2014 through 2019. Beth
	brings a critical perspective to this distinguished witness
	panel and can provide first-hand insight into ERCOT and the
	power supply industry as a whole. I look forward to her
	testimony highlighting the needs and challenges of our diverse
	and complex power delivery system.
	This hearing will also serve as an opportunity to discuss
	grid security legislation. Last Congress, H.R. 5760, the Grid
	Security Research and Development Act, passed the House with
	strong bipartisan support. This legislation authorizes DOE
	research, development, and demonstration activities that focus
	on the discovery of innovative tools and technologies for
	energy sector security and resilience. The provisions in this
	bill were originally a central component of the bipartisan and
	bicameral Energy Act of 2020, which became law last Congress.
	Unfortunately, due to last minute jurisdictional claims from
	outside committees, this bill had to be removed from the Energy
	Act in the 11th hour. I'm hopeful that we can work together to
	once again introduce and pass grid security legislation this
	year.
	The energy sector faces unique challenges that require
	institutional knowledge and data that only the Department of
	Energy can provide. DOE is responsible for energy critical
	infrastructure, which includes electric power, oil and natural
	gas. It also has authority over the cybersecurity of energy
	delivery systems. Providing DOE researchers and industry with
	the tools they need to ensure the long-term security and
	resiliency of our electric grid should be something we can all
	agree on. This Congress I will prioritize getting these
	provisions over the finish line, working with my friends on
	both sides of the aisle to get this done.
	I thank our witnesses today for their valuable testimony at
	such a critical time. I look forward to a productive discussion
	about how federal agencies can work with industry to deliver
	affordable power to American homes, businesses, and essential
	services.
	Thank you Madam Chair and I yield back the balance of my
	time.

	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.
	And at this time if there are persons who would wish to
	submit a statement for the record, you're welcome to do that.
	I'd like now to introduce our witnesses. Dr. Jesse Jenkins
	is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University with a joint
	appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace
	Engineering, and the Andlinger Center for Energy and
	Environment. Dr. Jenkins also leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, the
	Zero carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization
	Laboratory. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering systems and a
	master's in technology and policy from the Massachusetts
	Institute of Technology (MIT).
	Dr. Varun Rai is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Professor in
	the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas
	(UT) at Austin. He is the Director of the UT Energy Institute
	and Associate Dean for Research in the LBJ School. He received
	his Ph.D. and his master's in mechanical engineering from
	Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in mechanical
	engineering from Indian Institute of Technology.
	Dr. Juan Torres is the Associate Laboratory Director of
	Energy Systems Integration at the National Renewable Energy
	Laboratory (NREL). In this role, he oversees NREL's research to
	modernize and strengthen the security, resilience, and
	sustainability of the Nation's electrical grid. Prior to his
	time at NREL, he had a 27-year career at Sandia National
	Laboratories. Mr. Torres holds a bachelor's degree in
	electronic engineering technology from the University of
	Southern Colorado, a master's degree in electrical engineering
	from the University of New Mexico.
	Ms. Beth Garza is a Senior Fellow with R Street's Energy
	and Environmental Policy Team. Ms. Garza previously served as
	the Director of Electric Reliability Council of Texas,
	Independent Market Monitor from 2014 through 2019 after serving
	as a Deputy Director since 2008. She is a graduate of the
	University of Missouri and a registered professional engineer
	in the State of Texas.
	Last but certainly not least, Dr. Sue Tierney is a Senior
	Advisor at Analysis Group, an economic consulting firm located
	in Boston. She is a former Assistant Secretary for Policy at
	the U.S. Department of Energy, State Cabinet Officer for
	Environmental Affairs, and State Public Utility Commissioner
	and has more than 35 years of experience in this field. Her
	master's degree and Ph.D. in regional planning are from Cornell
	University.
	I want to thank all of our outstanding witnesses for
	joining us today. And as our witnesses should know, you will
	have 5 minutes for your spoken testimony. Your written
	testimony will be included in the record for the hearing. When
	you have completed your spoken testimony, we will begin our
	questions. Each Member will have 5 minutes to question you as a
	panel.
	Now we will start with Dr. Jenkins. Dr. Jenkins, you may
	begin your testimony.

	TESTIMONY OF DR. JESSE JENKINS, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

	OF MECHANICAL AND AEROSPACE ENGINEERING,

	ANDLINGER CENTER FOR ENERGY

	AND THE ENVIRONMENT AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

	Dr. Jenkins. Thank you, and good morning. My name is Jesse
	Jenkins, and I must note that the views expressed in this
	testimony are my own and I am not speaking as a Representative
	of Princeton University.
	I'd like to first thank Chair Johnson and Ranking Member
	Lucas and the Members of this Committee for inviting my
	testimony, and I commend the Committee for holding this hearing
	and for trying to get to the bottom of what went wrong in Texas
	during last month's extreme cold. The truth is there is plenty
	of blame to go around. The failures to plan for and build
	resilience to this extreme cold were systemic. All sources of
	power experienced failures from natural gas and coal plants to
	wind turbines and even one of the State's four nuclear
	reactors.
	The energy crisis was not limited just to the power
	system. Natural gas wells and pipelines also froze, cutting off
	gas supply just as it was needed most. And State and Federal
	policymakers alike all failed to require more robust
	winterization measures after a 2011 storm provided ample
	warning of the fragility of Texas's energy infrastructure to
	extreme cold.
	These systemic failures make it easy to cherry-pick claims
	that advance one's preferred narrative, but the dozens of
	Texans who died and the millions who suffered through the
	crisis deserve a full account of what went wrong. And now is
	the time to learn from the crisis and to take steps to prepare
	for the extreme weather that all Americans face, threats that
	climate change is making more severe.
	Energy systems can and should be made more resilient with
	existing technology. After all, wind turbines operate today in
	Antarctica, gas plants in Alberta, and gas wells in Alaska. Of
	course, weatherizing our infrastructure comes at an added cost
	that must be paid back every year in the hopes that devastating
	but rare crises are avoided. In this way, building resilience
	to extreme events is a bit like buying fire insurance for your
	home. Most of us buy insurance not because we ever expect our
	homes to burn, but we know that if such a tragedy should occur,
	we'd lose everything, and building our lives back may be
	impossible. So we pay the premium every year. Determining how
	much insurance in the form of investment in grid resilience is
	worth it, and what kinds of crises we wish to protect against
	is thus the key question.
	Answering this question is more difficult now than ever
	because the changing climate means the past is no longer a safe
	guide to the future. Extreme weather events are dangerous
	because our critical infrastructures are resilient only up to a
	point. When pushed a little bit further, a few degrees colder
	or hotter, an inch more rain, these systems can fail in
	catastrophic ways.
	This is where research can make a difference. Expanded
	investment in climate science could help planners build more
	resilient systems. This research should focus on assessing
	impacts on critical infrastructures and identifying
	catastrophic failure modes.
	We must also look forward to the technologies needed to
	build a resilient, affordable, and clean electricity system. We
	can see a glimpse of this feature in Texas where wind and solar
	provide a quarter of all electricity in 2020, more than 2.5
	times the national average. Yet during this crisis, wind and
	solar provided at times a tiny fraction of their maximum
	output, leaving some to question can we assure a clean and
	resilient grid with a larger role for wind and solar power? The
	answer is yes, and to understand why, we need to understand the
	role of each resource in our electricity system.
	We don't need every source of electricity to be reliable
	at all times. What we need is the system to be reliable, and
	that requires a mix of electricity resources all playing the
	right role. Wind and solar don't deliver value by being
	dependable. Everyone knows the wind is inconstant and the night
	affects solar output. Wind and solar deliver real value as
	fuel-saving resources. When available, these resources displace
	costlier sources of electricity from fuel-consuming resources
	like natural gas and coal. That saves billions of dollars and
	helps reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
	What we also need is to maintain sufficient firm
	generating capacity to deliver necessary reliability. Firm
	resources are technologies that are available on-demand any
	time of the year for as long as needed. These characteristics
	make firm resources a critical complement to weather-dependent
	renewable energy sources, as well as resources like batteries
	that are best suited to fast bursts of use rather than
	sustained output over several days or weeks.
	For instance, Princeton's Net-Zero America study, which I
	co-authored, finds that the United States needs to maintain a
	similar magnitude of firm generating capacity as we have today
	as the Nation makes a big but affordable transition to net zero
	greenhouse gas emissions.
	Over the next decade existing gas capacity and nuclear
	reactors can act as firm resources and ensure reliability as
	wind and solar expand and displace coal and gas-fired
	generation. But reaching 100 percent carbon-free electricity
	systems will ultimately require sufficient clean firm capacity,
	and the time to invest in these technologies is now. Wind,
	solar, lithium ion batteries took decades to improve, including
	funding from R&D, demonstration and creation of early market
	opportunities through subsidies and standards. This proven
	process of making clean energy cheap must now be replicated for
	a full portfolio of clean firm technologies.
	In the Energy Act of 2020, this Committee worked on a
	bipartisan basis to enact critical new authorizations to
	advance many of these innovative clean firm technologies. More
	effort and investment will be required to scale up and improve
	these technologies in the years ahead beginning with
	appropriations this year to make new authorizations a reality.
	Thank you for having me today, and I look forward to
	engaging with you on these critical questions.
	[The prepared statement of Dr. Jenkins follows:]
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Jenkins.
	Dr. Varun Rai.

	TESTIMONY OF DR. VARUN RAI,

	ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR RESEARCH;

	PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS,

	LBJ SCHOOL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

	AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

	Dr. Rai. Thank you, Chair Johnson. Good morning, everyone.
	Good morning to Ranking Member Lucas and other Members of the
	Committee. My name is Varun Rai. I'm a Professor at the
	University of Texas at Austin, and thank you for the
	opportunity to appear before you for this important hearing.
	I live in Austin, Texas. Texas-wide power outages started
	early morning on the 15th of February, affecting more than 4
	million homes and businesses over 3 days. Inside our house, the
	temperature went down into the 30's for several days. It was
	like living inside of a refrigerator for days. Sadly, some of
	my fellow Texans died due to the crisis and aren't around to
	tell their tales.
	There were three key contributors to the severity of the
	impact. First, equipment in both power generation and gas
	production systems froze. After another blackout in Texas in
	2011, winterization of both power and gas equipment was
	identified as a high-priority item. Some changes were made
	based on those recommendations, but most standards are
	requirements tied to operational performance in extreme cold
	were set. This has meant that there is insufficient overall
	investment in winterization of the energy system in Texas.
	Second, there were gaffes in communication and
	coordination. As part of ERCOT's load shedding, power to many
	oil and gas field operations were shut down, which meant a
	further strain on gas production on top of declines in
	production due to the weather. Power was also lost at water
	treatment and pumping facilities across the State. On the
	customer side, there was an absolute lack of coordinated,
	consistent, and timely emergency communication to the people of
	Texas. This translated the extreme weather-induced stress on
	the power system into a severe humanitarian crisis.
	Third, even with clear warning of a severe weather event
	days and even weeks ahead, there were not enough calls in
	advance to reduce demand and conserve energy, including both
	electricity and gas. In my view, not mobilizing enough
	voluntary demand reduction during the weather event was the
	single biggest lost opportunity to minimize the impacts of the
	crisis.
	Looking ahead, to learn fully from the Texas power crisis
	of February 2021 there are five questions that need further and
	immediate research to support decisionmaking. Over 4 million
	homes and businesses in Texas lost power during the crisis.
	Power outage led to a water crisis. The power and water
	failures put millions of Texans under extreme physical, mental,
	and financial stress. The load sheds were based on
	unsophisticated critical-load lists, which did not account for
	infrastructure interdependency, thus we need research and--to
	design load-management strategies to minimize extreme stress
	for households , taking into account the interdependent nature
	of critical infrastructure and implications for fairness and
	equity.
	Some early estimates put the damages and economic losses
	upwards of $100 billion. The full scale and scope of costs and
	losses are multifaceted, for example, damages to water
	infrastructure and loss production at manufacturing facilities
	and bankruptcies of companies and local utilities and local
	governments. We should consider all these factors when
	evaluating the benefits and costs of infrastructure
	investments. There is critical need to support research that
	advances a more robust and comprehensive accounting and
	understanding of the full scale of damages that result from
	extreme events.
	As I mentioned before, one of the biggest failures in the
	days leading up to the event was how poorly the demand side was
	engaged. Demand flexibility, both programmatic and voluntary,
	will inevitably need to play a much larger and effective role
	in the future to maintain system reliability in the face of
	extreme events. Achieving that flexibility at very large scale
	and over short timeframes of hours and days is an important
	area of further research.
	To outside observers, during much of the crisis there was
	very little information and data about the status of the system
	and how it might evolve. People were not just in power
	darkness; they were also in information darkness. To address
	this, there is a need to design data-sharing mechanisms and
	collaborative efforts, including researchers at universities
	and national labs with appropriate data-governance mechanisms
	to enable monitoring, analysis, feedback, and problem-solving
	by the broader community around and during crises.
	With the frequency of extreme weather events expected to
	increase as impacts of climate change unfold further, the need
	to understand the long-term benefits and cost of connecting
	ERCOT to the U.S. Eastern and Western grids is also immediate.
	In particular, we need research that accounts for climate-
	induced stresses on the energy system, systemwide
	vulnerabilities and options, changing energy mix, and changing
	nature of demand.
	Thank you again for the opportunity to present at this
	hearing, and I look forward to the discussion.
	[The prepared statement of Dr. Rai follows:]
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Rai.
	Mr. Juan Torres.

	TESTIMONY OF MR. JUAN TORRES,

	ASSOCIATE LABORATORY DIRECTOR,

	ENERGY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION

	NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY

	Mr. Torres. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas,
	Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to
	discuss [inaudible]. I commend the Committee for this timely
	hearing, as it will inform research that will help guide the
	Nation toward a more secure and resilient energy future. My
	name is Juan Torres, and I serve as the Associate Laboratory
	Director for Energy Systems Integration at the U.S. Department
	of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, in
	Golden, Colorado. I've been affiliated with Federal research in
	our national laboratory system for over 30 years. In my current
	position, I direct NREL's efforts to strengthen the security
	resilience and sustainability of our Nation's electric grid. In
	addition, I'm Co-Chair for the DOE Grid Modernization
	Laboratory Consortium and Technical Lead for its Security and
	Resilience Teams.
	I observed the catastrophic failures of the Texas energy
	system not just as a research engineer but as a concerned
	parent, as both of my children reside in Texas. My son works in
	Austin and my daughter is a graduate student in Irving. The
	severity of the event was clear when the conversations with
	them became do you have enough food, water, and blankets? Sit
	in your car and run it to charge your phone and get warm.
	Tragically, many others in the Texas community had it much
	worse.
	It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention.
	I can say that we have many needs with regards to the power
	grid, but I'm also hopeful because we as a nation have the
	innovation and horsepower to meet these needs. But where do we
	start? First, we need to understand where we came from and
	where we're going. There is no single owner, operator, or
	architect for the U.S. power system. It is an engineering
	marvel influenced by a collective of stakeholders over more
	than a century.
	Recent years have seen the grid evolve from a network
	based on large, centralized generation to a hybrid system
	incorporating more distributed renewable resources. Significant
	changes are also occurring at the grid edge near the consumer.
	Never before has a consumer been more proactive and engaged
	with the operation of the grid. Real-time pricing, transactive
	energy, smart appliances and lighting, grid-interactive
	buildings and smart loads, electric vehicles, and residential
	photovoltaics are just some of the technologies transforming
	the edge of the grid. And we have yet to understand the long-
	term energy impacts that innovations resulting from COVID-19's
	influence on the work-from-home culture.
	Equally important is awareness of the dynamic threat space
	which includes not only severe weather but also physical
	attacks, geomagnetic disturbances, electromagnetic pulse (EMP)
	events, and the ever-growing cyber threat. I offer the
	following recommendations based on critical lessons from the
	recent outage in Texas and other past major storm events.
	First, take actions to harden the grid and generation
	fleet to the broad spectrum of evolving threats for improved
	monitoring, planning, investments, and technology advancements.
	Second, address the overall resilience of the energy
	system from fuel to generation, to delivery, to end-use, taking
	into account interdependent infrastructure such as
	communication systems, natural gas pipelines, and
	transportation systems.
	Third, research how a grid with more controllable devices
	and increasingly high penetrations of variable renewable
	generation can be even more secure and resilient than today's
	grid.
	While these challenges are considerable, research is
	lighting the path forward. Let me give you some examples. DOE's
	Grid Modernization Initiative (GMI) and the 14 national labs in
	the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium have been working
	with industry and academia to tackle grid research challenges
	over the past 5 years in devices, advanced architectures and
	controls, design and planning tools, generation, sensors,
	regulatory policy support, and security and resilience.
	NAERM, the North American Energy Resilience Model, is a
	DOE multi-lab comprehensive modeling capability being developed
	to support grid planning and investment and to understand the
	grid's state of resilience while considering interdependencies
	with the natural gas and communication sectors.
	ARIES, NREL's state-of-the-art Advanced Research on
	Integrated Energy Systems platform, is leading the way for
	large-scale experimentation and cyber emulation of the future
	grid from behind the meter to the bulk transmission system.
	We've only just opened the door to many new research
	directions.
	Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I
	look forward to any questions you may have.
	[The prepared statement of Mr. Torres follows:]
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much, Mr. Torres.
	Ms. Beth Garza.

	TESTIMONY OF MS. BETH GARZA,

	SENIOR FELLOW, R STREET INSTITUTE

	Ms. Garza. Thank you. Good morning, Chairwoman Johnson,
	Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee. Before I
	get started, I want to add my recognition to the tremendous
	human impacts suffered by Texans during the February winter
	storms. I'm sure the efforts of this Committee will help ensure
	that the U.S. infrastructure--excuse me--becomes better able to
	withstand the challenges that it faces.
	Today, I'm going to discuss three areas where research
	would be of most value. These are forecasting, the
	weatherization or winterization of power plants and their fuel
	supply, and the third area is the improved granularity of
	operation and control of demand within the electricity
	distribution systems.
	So starting with forecasting, demand for electricity is
	very sensitive to weather conditions, primarily temperature,
	and as an industry, we've become very good at forecasting
	customer demand based on foreseeable weather conditions.
	However, if we had a better long-term view of potential weather
	conditions, system preparedness and resiliency would improve.
	ERCOT prepares and publishes an assessment of demand and
	supply for each season. Unfortunately, their forecast for
	extreme demand this past winter was based on weather
	experienced during February 2011. The weather conditions
	actually experienced this year were much were much more severe.
	I believe all electric utility systems would benefit from new
	forecasting tools and techniques to ensure their longer-range
	planning is preparing them for the conditions that they may
	face.
	Moving on to the winterization of supply, I caution that
	it's too early to draw detailed conclusions about the causes of
	all of the generator outages that we--that resulted in the
	curtailment of firm load, but based on preliminary data, it is
	clear that every type of generation--nuclear, coal, natural
	gas, wind, and solar--were limited in some manner during the
	extreme cold that we experienced.
	Also, based on preliminary data, generator outages were
	primarily the result of insufficient weatherization and fuel
	supply disruptions. I've heard that maybe half of the outages
	that natural gas plants--power plants were due to the lack of
	fuel delivered at sufficient volumes and pressures. It's too
	early to draw specific conclusions other than to recognize the
	codependence of electricity and natural gas systems, especially
	in Texas.
	Much has been made of the lack of mandatory winterization
	standards for power plants, and I suggest that it's easy to say
	that winterization should be mandatory, but effective
	regulations require a specific standard to be met, and any such
	standard should also have benefits that exceed cost. And one of
	the challenges power plants and natural gas system owners in
	Texas face is appropriately assessing the winterization
	benefits due to the relative infrequency of very cold weather.
	Winterization comes in various forms with different costs and
	performance implications, and understanding these costs and
	performance tradeoffs will be very valuable to the standard-
	setting process.
	My last point has to do with distribution system
	improvements. Texas has an expansive advanced metering
	infrastructure. Preliminary results indicate that the Texas
	smart grid was not managed in a particularly smart manner. For
	example, the General Manager of Austin Energy, my local public
	power utility, described our advanced meters as capable of
	being disconnected remotely but requiring a person in the field
	to reconnect.
	This same topic came up during a recent hearing at the
	Texas legislature where an executive from CenterPoint Energy,
	which serves the greater Houston area, described different
	limitations preventing them from using their advanced meters to
	manage curtailment. And limitations as I've heard them
	described seem to be a lack of supplemental technologies
	combined with institutional and policy differences. The same
	improvements that could have eased the burden of these lengthy
	outages to a subset of customers could also form the foundation
	for demand to express their willingness to pay and receive
	higher reliability. The ability to use scarce supply to serve
	demand, which values it the most, is the foundation of economic
	efficiency.
	I look forward to your questions. Thank you.
	[The prepared statement of Ms. Garza follows:]
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much, Ms. Garza.
	Dr. Sue Tierney.

	TESTIMONY OF DR. SUE TIERNEY,

	SENIOR ADVISOR, ANALYSIS GROUP

	Dr. Tierney. Good morning, Chairman--Chairwoman Johnson,
	Ranking Member Lucas, and Members of the Committee. My name is
	Sue Tierney. Although I am testifying today on my own behalf, I
	also share various grid resiliency and research-related
	recommendations from two recent National Academies of Sciences
	Committees on which I have served.
	The recent power outages in Texas led to extremely
	challenging living conditions for millions of people and of
	course the tragedy of 70 people having lost their lives. It
	disrupted access to critical services like heating and water
	supply. This crisis highlights the critical role that reliable
	and resilient electric service plays in the health and well-
	being of Americans.
	It is clear that steps could have been taken by State
	officials, grid operators, and energy companies in Texas that
	would have lessened the extent of the crisis in these human
	hardships. These events cry out for the need for further
	research to ensure a resilient electric supply, especially as
	we anticipate worsening and more frequent extreme weather
	conditions in the decades ahead.
	The Federal Government has an essential role to play here.
	As the Academies of Sciences' 2017 report on enhancing the
	resiliency of the electric grid pointed out--and I'm quoting
	here--``The Department of Energy is the Federal entity with a
	mission to focus on the longer-term issues of developing and
	promulgating technologies and strategies to increase the
	resilience and modernization of the grid.'' No other entity in
	the United States has the mission to support such work. This is
	a public good. If funding were not provided by the Federal
	Government, this gap in research won't be filled by the States
	or the private sector. In short, this is a role for the Federal
	Government.
	In my written testimony, I discussed factors that affected
	the power outages in Texas and related research needs. Because
	others on the panel have already talked about the Texas
	electricity crisis, I would only add a couple of points. Texas
	is the only State in the United States with an electric
	industry structure that combines an energy-only competitive
	wholesale market and mandatory customer choice among
	competitive retail suppliers. This is largely viewed by
	academic economists as having been a successful electricity
	market design, although some observers, including myself, have
	questioned whether such an approach that relies explicitly on
	the expectation of very high electricity prices, at times power
	shortages, is politically sustainable in the event that such
	conditions actually occur.
	Now, for several years the North American Electric
	Reliability Council (NERC) pointed--has pointed out ERCOT's
	slim reserve margins as contributing to reliability risks.
	Texas previously experienced winter conditions which created
	electric reliability problems. In following up on
	investigations in 2011, the staff of the Federal Energy
	Research--Regulatory--excuse me, Regulatory Commission (FERC)
	and NERC said the outages could have been avoided, and they
	encouraged State policymakers to adopt policies to encourage
	performance of the system under stressful conditions. However,
	for the most part, policymakers and the electric and gas
	industries in Texas did not act on these recommendations, and
	this set the stage for the events in February this year.
	Clearly, these are a chilling reminder of the critical need for
	reliable and resilient electricity in the--our basic needs.
	Although the Texas electricity crisis was an unusual
	event, it could happen anywhere, and proactive steps should be
	taken to lower the risk impacts of the occurrences. The 2017
	Reliability and Resilience Report from the National Academies,
	along with a new report in February 2021 on the future of the
	power system, identified grid resilience as a key issue. In my
	written testimony, I have provided seven pages of findings and
	recommendations from these two studies, and I won't go through
	them here. Let me just mention a very short set.
	First, we conclude that research--scientific research and
	applied development and demonstration programs related to the
	electric industry should be tripled. That's for science, and
	much more of this support should be in multiyear
	appropriations.
	I see my time is up, and I would encourage the Committee
	to take a careful look at my written testimony for the
	additional recommendations. And I appreciate so much the
	Committee's attention to these important issues. Thank you.
	[The prepared statement of Dr. Tierney follows:]
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
	At this point we will begin our first round of questions,
	and I will recognize myself for 5 minutes. Dr. Rai, you pointed
	out that ERCOT's strategy for implementing load curtailment in
	order to keep demand and supply roughly even while generation
	supplies were out was basically all or nothing. Rather than
	users curtailing part of their electricity demand by lowering
	their thermostats or cutting some of their electricity use,
	entire subnetworks were either on or off. Is this how Houston
	got into the infuriating situation where people were freezing
	in their homes and yet when they looked across the way at
	downtown, all the buildings were lit up and electrified with no
	one inside?
	And the second question, how could a smarter load
	management strategy provide for more equity in grid operations
	during an emergency so that low-income neighborhoods don't take
	it all on the chin more than others? Dr. Rai, could you
	enlighten us a bit?
	Dr. Rai. Thank you so much for that question, Chairwoman
	Johnson. Your sense is right. The severity of the supply
	disruption was so high that in many parts, in most parts of
	Texas only critical load and critical circuits were kept alive.
	Everything--all the load-critical circuits, a majority of them,
	were shed. And that meant that the noncritical load that are
	part of the critical load circuits that were kept alive, they
	also stayed on, and there was not much ability, again, just
	because of the severity and the depth of the event to rotate
	outages.
	And so that's linked very much to your second part of the
	question, Chairwoman Johnson, in terms of being able to rotate
	the outages and being fair and equitable about it. It did mean
	that there were several parts across Texas where lower-income
	communities did have to weather more brunt of the whole event.
	And so as we heard from Ms. Garza, a much more granular
	approach to how this--these events are managed, the
	technologies do exist, but they do operate also in the
	underlying regulatory as well as operational context. And
	taking a holistic look at that is extremely important, but it
	is very possible and is one of the top priorities--it is one of
	the most low-hanging fruits there, Chairwoman.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Dr. Jenkins, you
	spoke in your testimony about the evidence tells us that caused
	these blackouts. I'd like to ask just a quick yes or no answer.
	Forbes published an op-ed in February of 2017 which claimed
	that a renewably sourced energy captures a larger share of the
	power grid. Outages become inevitable. Is this true?
	Dr. Jenkins. No, that's not true. If power systems
	maintain sufficient firm generation that complement wind and
	solar, we can maintain reliability and expand the role of wind
	and solar, lowering costs and lowering carbon dioxide
	emissions.
	Chairwoman Johnson. The Texas Public Policy Foundation
	published a statement in February--on February the 16th which
	claimed that fossil fuel electric generation didn't fail. Is
	that true?
	Dr. Jenkins. That's not correct. We had over 30,000
	megawatts of fossil generation capacity that was on forced
	outage during the crisis making up the bulk of the total
	electricity shortfall during the blackout, so natural gas power
	plants in particular were the largest absolute contributor to
	generation outages during the events.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. In the same statement, the
	Texas Public Policy Foundation claimed that blackouts never
	would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply
	penetrated by renewable energy sources. Is that true?
	Dr. Jenkins. That's not correct. There was sufficient firm
	generation capacity installed that if it had operated as
	intended, it would have supplied adequate supplies for the
	system. The Texas system operator plans on as little as 1,700
	megawatts of contribution from wind and solar power during
	extreme winter events such as that occurred in February, and so
	just a small fraction of what Texas was counting on to be there
	was wind and solar power. What Texans were counting on were
	natural gas and other firm power sources, and when those firm
	power sources fail, that's when widespread blackouts can occur.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. My time is
	expired. I'll now call on our Ranking Member Mr. Lucas for 5
	minutes of questions.
	Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair. My home district in
	Oklahoma was also impacted by last month's winter storms and
	great interruptions. And while data is still being collected,
	one thing is clear. No single energy source, be it coal, wind,
	or natural gas, carries all the blame. The fact is a diverse
	supply of affordable, reliable energy sources is essential to
	the success of our power delivery system.
	Ms. Garza, Mr. Torres, how will the adoption of new energy
	sources and hybrid energy systems affect how Congress and the
	Federal Government should be addressing grid security and
	resilience? And whichever one would care to go first.
	Ms. Garza. Well, you said my name first, so I guess I'll
	go first, Mr. Lucas. You--your comment was dead on. It--we all
	benefit from--I believe we all benefit from a wide variety of
	energy sources, and so with that we have to recognize common
	causes of failure across all of those sources. But just having
	more and different types of generation should prove to be more
	reliable rather than relying all on one.
	Mr. Lucas. Mr. Torres?
	Mr. Torres. Thank you for the question, Representative
	Lucas. What I see is that the evolution of renewables here,
	we're still at a state where we're not putting the same
	expectations on those renewables as we have on some of the
	legacy baseload types of generation or other fossil generation.
	For example, you know, I gave a testimony not long ago on black
	start, so putting those kinds of requirements so we can start
	to build that in to some of the new emerging technologies is
	really important.
	One of the other differences is, as renewables are coming
	into play a bigger part of our energy portfolio, they're not
	located as just centralized generation plants but also as
	distributed resources. So now we can generate power, you know,
	at--near the loads at homes and businesses, and that gives us
	different opportunities to use renewables for things like
	microgrids to provide some local resiliency for critical loads.
	So this is actually--the new technologies are giving us new
	opportunities and potential that we haven't had before with
	strictly centralized generation.
	Mr. Lucas. This Congress I plan to reintroduce my bill,
	the Securing American Leadership in Science and Technology Act,
	which calls for the doubling of funding in DOE's Office of
	Science. Ms. Garza, what research is needed for technologies
	like advanced sensors and controls to assist the grid in
	emergency response?
	Ms. Garza. So the--so some of the challenges we face in
	terms of the outages and how those curtailments are managed,
	they are managed in a very blocky manner if you will. And how
	that works is a device in a substation is open, cutting off
	electricity to hundreds if not a couple of thousands of
	customers. And those actions are required to be taken very
	quickly, and that's how, you know, over the centuries we
	realized how to do it.
	But technology exists to allow those very fast actions--I
	believe exist to allow those very fast actions to occur in a
	more granular level. We don't need to take out a whole feeder
	at once where along that feeder you could have some critical
	loads, there are some noncritical loads, there are some, you
	know, differing levels of reliability requirements for all of
	those customers. And by knowing that across your system, it
	seems like we could manage the reaction or the response in a
	much more granular and a much more targeted level than we're
	able to do now, and that in my mind requires software sensors,
	you know, all the whizbang stuff that needs to exist to allow
	that to occur.
	Mr. Lucas. Mr. Torres, in the time I have remaining how
	can fundamental research in areas like materials science and
	advanced computing support this work, this effort?
	Mr. Torres. I believe that there's opportunity to develop
	more inherently resilient materials that will comprise the grid
	of the future, so building your resilience into the system from
	the ground up, make it an inherent element in how we operate
	and how we design our systems. There is opportunities with
	things like artificial intelligence to help us better assess
	with forecasting information how to optimize operation of the
	grid. We can also utilize distributed computing to help us
	manage and operate the grid much differently than we do today
	where we operate in very, very centralized control
	architecture.
	Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. And I will ask
	the Clerk now to assist us in going to our Members for
	questions.
	Staff. Mr. Bera is next.
	Mr. Bera. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman and to the Ranking
	Member, for convening this hearing. Obviously, very timely and
	incredibly important.
	I also, you know, appreciate the Raking Member's comments,
	but, you know, if we take the politics out of this, it's not,
	you know, one type of electrical source versus another versus
	another. It's what can we do to create redundancy here and
	redundant sources. And if we could remove the politics, you
	know, we could let the science and entrepreneurial spirit of
	America address these issues. And, you know, far too often it's
	the politics that prevent us from recognizing that our climate
	is changing, that we're having more extreme events that are
	occurring similar to the winter snowstorm in Texas but also in
	my home State of California. We see increasing wind events that
	have led to, you know, wildfires, you know, they have now led
	to rolling blackouts when we see the wind starting to pick up.
	And, you know, that is unfortunately going to become more
	common, not less common.
	Part of the reason we have introduced in the last few
	Congresses the Grid Security Research and Development Act was
	we do have to make those investments in research in both the
	physical security of our electrical grid but also the cyber
	risk that our electrical grid faces. And, you know, I'm pleased
	that the Chairwoman and the Ranking Member, we passed it out of
	Committee and we passed it out of the House twice last year,
	did not quite get across the finish line, but we're going to
	reintroduce that act, which is bipartisan and, you know, get
	that through the Senate and get that to the President's desk.
	And we think that would be a big first step.
	You know, maybe a question for Dr. Tierney. You talked
	about the Academy and some of the recommendations that the
	Academy was making in terms of research but also security.
	Could you expand on some of those recommendations and, you
	know, if we were to prioritize where we ought to focus, you
	know, what your recommendations would be?
	Dr. Tierney. Thank you for that great question,
	Representative Bera. And speaking on behalf of myself, I think
	this--the bill that you plan to introduce is a very powerful
	tool to help with security and resilience in the face of
	cybersecurity events and other kinds of events as well.
	So the 2021 report called ``The Future of the Electric
	Grid'' included a number of recommendations regarding
	congressional authorization, appropriations, and DOE
	implementation of RD&D related to cybersecurity in particular.
	First, one of the things that we called for was--is the
	updating periodically of research and development roadmaps with
	regard to cyber. The world is changing very fast in this way,
	and it--at the moment, the research agenda is not keeping up
	with the changes that are in place. That would involve a number
	of things associated with capability to visualize what's going
	on in the grid, information detection and controls, sensor data
	in order to capture that kind of information, critical needs
	for a workforce in this area that is really up to snuff. There
	are very serious needs in terms of developing the expertise.
	I know you have limited time in here, so I'll stop there
	and follow up if you'd like.
	Mr. Bera. OK. Fantastic. You know, it occurs to me that,
	you know, one of the--you know, our energy rates in California
	obviously are higher than the rates in Texas, and, you know,
	while the Federal Government doesn't dictate what States
	charge, you know, our user rates are higher because, you know,
	we have tried to create that redundancy and so forth. And, you
	know, my impression is Texas rates are lower because they had
	chosen not to, you know, do some of the physical measures to
	protect against these extreme weather events.
	Again, I understand the independence of Texas and, you
	know, we can't go in there and tell them you've got to raise
	your rates and--what levers do we have, you know, again,
	wanting to protect the citizens of Texas from another extreme
	event like this? And, again, I don't know who best to answer
	that question, but, you know, what are things that we could do
	to compel Texans to do the right thing to protect their
	citizens?
	Dr. Tierney. Well, it is the case that Texas is
	independent from a--from Federal supervision under the Federal
	Power Act on rates, but for reliability purposes, Texas is
	under the supervision of the North American Electric
	Reliability Council, and that has implemented authority from
	Congress through the FERC to address reliability. So there is
	room there under current authority to put much stronger
	incentives at least for Texas to adopt different behaviors.
	Mr. Bera. Right. Just, again, knowing many Texans, my
	preference isn't to tell the Texans what to do. Congressman
	Sessions would get mad at me if I did that. But it's to work
	together as the United States of America to make sure we
	protect all our citizens.
	So with that I'll yield back, Madam Chairwoman.
	Staff. Mr. Posey is next.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Mr. Posey.
	Mr. Posey. Thank you. And I really appreciate
	Congresswoman Johnson for holding this hearing.
	My questions are for Mr. Torres. Grid security is American
	security. Do you agree with that statement?
	Mr. Torres. I do.
	Mr. Posey. Thank you. Any component plugged into the grid
	must be beyond reproach and ideally a source from trusted
	suppliers that are not affiliated with or controlled by or
	manufactured by an adversarial country like China. This
	approach will support our energy independence. On page 8 of
	your testimony you rightly mentioned that the new rise in
	cybersecurity vulnerabilities are real, especially as it
	relates to new energy technologies, and one trend that is a
	challenge for the system resilience according to you is the
	loss in control and knowledge of the technology supply chain.
	Could you explain to this Committee how the Department of
	Energy has a system reliance challenge involving the loss of
	control and knowledge of the technology supply chain?
	Mr. Torres. Sure. What I meant to say there--and I can
	elaborate on that--is the fact that the grid and the elements
	that we're putting in the grid are driven by the market, and we
	operate and we procure energy components in a global market.
	And even when we purchase equipment and systems today from a
	U.S. vendor, that doesn't necessarily imply that everything in
	that system or device comes--is all manufactured by that vendor
	because they typically buy subcomponents, other software
	elements from vendors that can be global. It could be centered
	in other countries. It could be chipsets, it could be firmware,
	it could be software and other pieces of hardware that comprise
	the system that we don't necessarily always have full control
	over.
	So understanding and providing some sort of guidance for
	how we can track what goes into those critical elements,
	especially when we're talking about things like black start
	and, you know, if the power grid entirely is blacked out, it
	could take days to weeks, maybe even longer to restart the--a
	large part of the grid. And so we have to be fully aware and
	confident in everything that's in the grid when we're
	restarting it.
	So those kinds of things I don't believe exist, especially
	for those kinds of procedures don't exist in the policies and
	directions of where we're going with some of the newer
	technologies. We don't have the same expectations for some of
	the new technologies yet. We've been managing nuclear power
	plants and coal plants and gas plants for a long time, and we
	know how to do that, but we don't necessarily understand it as
	technologies are evolving what we need to do for things that
	may be added to the grid in the future.
	Mr. Posey. Yes, I hope that we can all agree it would be
	stupid for us to have power grids full of Chinese chip
	components. On May 1 of 2020, former President Trump signed an
	Executive Order 13920 to prohibit the acquisition of
	installation of certain bulk power system electrical equipment
	sourced from foreign adversaries that pose a demonstrated undue
	risk. Are you familiar with the bulk power Executive Order that
	was signed and suspended by the current President until April
	20th with Executive Order 13990?
	Mr. Torres. Yes, I am.
	Mr. Posey. Do you know if the current Administration plans
	to reinstate the Executive order to ensure America's grid
	security?
	Mr. Torres. I do not know.
	Mr. Posey. If you find out, would you be kind enough to
	let us know?
	Mr. Torres. I will work with the Department of Energy to
	provide you all the information that I can.
	Mr. Posey. Thank you very much, Mr. Torres. Madam Chair, I
	yield back.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
	Staff. Ms. Stevens is next.
	Ms. Stevens. Thank you so much. Usually those of us in the
	North--Northern States make the quips about how our friends in
	Southern States, you know, aren't used to cold weather. The
	reality is in this case there isn't a quip to make because the
	crisis and the event that took place in Texas and in Oklahoma
	was catastrophic. And the history books will remember that the
	Chairwoman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee
	brought us together for this hearing to get an understanding of
	the research needs that must go in to making sure that we have
	a grid that works. Lives were lost, people were put into tons
	of pain, business was impacted, and in the United States of
	America this is just something we never want to see, in the
	middle of a pandemic, mind you. So I appreciate all the expert
	and--you know, expert witness testimony here today.
	I did mention that I come from Michigan, and much of our
	conversation as it pertains to the grid in my State is focusing
	on electric vehicles. And I did want to ask a couple of you--
	and I think you all may be equipped to lean in on this--but how
	equipped is our grid for the arrival of electric vehicles in
	the sense that they are right now comprising one percent of
	cars on the road with projection to go much higher than that?
	And even if we--you know, I think much higher than we are, we
	have to look at grid capacity. So I'd just--I'd be--you know,
	Beth, I see you're nodding your head. If you want to jump in,
	that would be great.
	Ms. Garza. So I think--thank you for the question. It's a
	great question. It's certainly one that's being discussed and
	deliberated in, you know, the energy policy world. There
	certainly are--there certainly is spare capacity currently in
	the distribution system to allow, you know, me or my neighbor
	to go get an electric vehicle and plug it in and we're--and
	that'll be fine. The questions then are, you know, once that
	becomes--you know, moves from 1 percent to 50 percent of the
	market, where are the stress points? Where do those exist? And
	I have every confidence that we can expand the grid and adjust
	the grid to manage that.
	I think also required is the interaction between, you
	know, advance control aspects because, for example, you know,
	do you really want to be charging electric vehicles if there's
	a person next door that doesn't have electricity to their house
	because there's not enough supply, right? We have to be able to
	price and value the different uses of electricity, and we need
	the systems and software and techniques to be able to balance
	that.
	Ms. Stevens. Yes, thank you. And let's also just talk--you
	know I've got a minute and a half left. Let's just also talk
	about--and I'm sure my other colleagues are going to get into
	this--but the designing of a cleaner grid. So in a recent New
	York Times article, you know, they're obviously reflecting on
	1/3 of America's greenhouse gas emissions are accounted for by
	transportation. You know, each year the electric cars and
	trucks are widely seen as a crucial part of the solution to
	climate change. It would also help if the electric grid that
	fueled these vehicles got a lot cleaner. Who has some thoughts
	about that and some of the ways in which we could make our
	electric grid cleaner?
	Dr. Jenkins. Representative Stevens, I could answer that
	question. Thank you.
	Ms. Stevens. Yes, thank you.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, over the next 10 years it would be
	possible if we continue to accelerate the pace of deployment of
	wind and solar, which I think we can do as these industries
	scale up, to increase the contribution of wind and solar from
	about 10 percent of our electricity today to as much as half by
	2030. That would significantly help--that would help
	significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the
	electricity sector, which is the No. 2 total source of
	emissions today, about 1/4 of our greenhouse gas emissions, by
	reducing the use of coal-fired and natural gas generation even
	if we keep the natural gas capacity around as a firm generation
	source.
	And so we can reduce emissions probably on the order of 70
	to 80 percent over the next decade in the electricity sector by
	scaling up technologies that are affordable and ready to go
	today. And we can use that same decade to proactively invest in
	the clean firm generation technologies that will ultimately
	need to replace or retrofit our existing natural gas fleet. If
	we do that, the power sector can help decarbonize
	transportation as well, as you noted, through electric
	vehicles, as well as heating through heat pumps.
	Ms. Stevens. Great, thank you so much. I yield back.
	Staff. Ms. Bice is next.
	Ms. Bice. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to all the
	witnesses this morning.
	This first question quickly is directed at Ms. Garza. You
	mentioned earlier that forecasting is based on a 10-year
	lookback. Can you expand on that? Because that seems really
	unbelievable to me.
	Ms. Garza. So the weather conditions, using--so I'll be
	upfront and say as a utility industry--and I consider myself
	part of that--we're not the most creative folks, and so all we
	know to do is to--is what we have experienced. And when ERCOT
	looks at their--looked at their seasonal forecast, even their
	extreme weather forecast or the demand resulting from extreme
	weather for this winter, all they had in their records was the
	extreme winter we had in 2011. And that's--that--we--that was a
	bad--we had rolling outages then. That was a bad situation.
	That was the most extreme we'd seen, and so that was the basis
	of an extreme forecast. And, as it turned out, we suffered
	something worse than that, so we were not fully versed or fully
	aware of what the potential could be. And so understanding that
	potential is what I'm--was what I was trying to get at.
	Ms. Bice. Thank you for clarifying that point. Mr.
	Jenkins, this question is for you. Would you be surprised to
	know that there has not been a nuclear reactor started online
	in over 30 years?
	Dr. Jenkins. No, I would not be surprised. Actually, there
	was one reactor that had been restarted the TVA (Tennessee
	Valley Authority) brought online, but yes, it's been a long
	time since we started construction or finished a project on
	time.
	Ms. Bice. So how do you think that the adoption of the
	newest technology, which is the small cell nuclear reactors,
	could actually play into the electric grid and actually address
	some of the concerns with availability of electricity on a
	large scale?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, so new small modular reactors could be a
	more affordable source of clean firm generation capacity, along
	with advanced geothermal energy, hydrogen combustion turbines
	or fuel cells, and carbon capture and sequestration on natural
	gas or coal or biomass-fired power plants. So all of those
	options, which this Committee has supported in the past on a
	bipartisan basis, can be developed proactively over the next
	decade, can be introduced into the market, made cheaper over
	time, and can ultimately help contribute to a more resilient
	and cleaner electricity system.
	Ms. Bice. I think that my point here is we've talked a lot
	about wind and solar but nobody has bothered to talk about
	nuclear. And although it's a very touchy subject, I understand
	that the dynamics of that, I think it's something we should be
	mindful of because nuclear sort of addresses some of the
	environmental issues that we see----
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes.
	Ms. Bice [continuing]. With, let's say, natural gas and
	coal. But the newest technology, which is just now coming
	around with these small nuclear reactors, actually provides an
	opportunity for us to increase capacity pretty greatly
	actually----
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes.
	Ms. Bice [continuing]. With less of an impact overall to
	anyone.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, and if I could just emphasize also there
	are research needs that could help extend the life of our
	existing nuclear fleet, which is our largest source of carbon-
	free generation and a key foundation to build on going forward.
	Ms. Bice. And I'm for your deal in investing more in
	research. I'm sure this Committee on a bipartisan basis would
	also agree with that.
	My last question, we talked a lot about the challenges
	with Texas and the impact of the natural gas shutdown. This
	question is for anyone. Do you believe that the winterization
	of the natural gas delivery and production could have prevented
	the large-scale failure that we saw? I think it was a 30
	percent reduction in delivery capacity.
	Dr. Tierney. I think this is a very important issue, and
	I'm really glad you brought it up. The incentives need to work
	to make sure that the generators are arranging for gas in a
	winterized way so that the gas supply can be helpful in
	critical periods like Texas just experienced. The National
	Academies report calls for a--an effort to make the gas
	industry processing production delivery system more reliable
	and visible, along the lines of what we already have on the
	electric side, so there is a lot of work could be done there.
	Dr. Rai. I think something I can add there is in terms of
	the visibility I think there is a lot of scope in terms of how
	the production happens and how it is impacted. It is--we are
	still finding out exactly what the impact was upon production
	losses because of winterization. The general answer is yes, it
	would have helped, but there's a lot of, you know, information
	needs and visibility needs there as well.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, we----
	Ms. Bice. Yes, I'll just close--I'm sorry, go ahead.
	Dr. Jenkins. I was going to say and it goes both
	directions, so they were losses of power to compressor stations
	that are needed to keep pressure up in the gas pipelines as
	well, and so the inter-linkages of these two systems is
	critical and needs to be explored and strengthened.
	Ms. Bice. And I'll just wrap up my closing by saying that
	I think that we've learned a little bit about making sure that
	infrastructure across the United States, whether it be in Texas
	or in California, that we're keeping up with maintenance on
	that infrastructure to prevent things like huge power outages
	or wildfires from occurring because of the lack of
	infrastructure upkeep. I yield back, Madam Chair.
	Staff. Ms. Wild is next.
	Ms. Wild. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Chair, for
	convening this hearing.
	My district is one of the districts in Pennsylvania.
	Pennsylvania has long been an energy leader in our country. And
	one of the things that I really wanted to get into is
	Pennsylvania is connected to a multistate grid, PJM
	Interconnection, which moves electricity from New Jersey down
	to South Carolina--excuse me, North Carolina, and as far west
	as Illinois covering all or some of 15 States and the District
	of Columbia.
	Drs. Rai and Jenkins, I wanted to ask you, how can
	multistate and regional grids reduce the risk our grid faces
	from severe weather and other threats relative to single state
	grids? And I'll just go ahead and ask the rest of the question.
	You can cover it as you will. What benefits would multistate
	grids offer for reliability and resilience as we transition
	toward renewable energies like solar and wind?
	Dr. Rai. Thank you so much----
	Dr. Jenkins. I----
	Dr. Rai. Thank you so much for that question, Ms. Wild.
	The answers are--there's a lot of questions in there. The last
	major studies about the value of interconnecting ERCOT
	[inaudible] to the other two grids were done a couple decades
	ago or over that. There have been other studies, smaller
	studies but really not a very big, significant. Times have
	changed a lot. Technologies have changed a lot. All three grids
	have experienced increased penetration of renewables. And as
	Dr. Jenkins mentioned, that is a trend that is going to only
	grow. There is a very strong and immediate need to take a much
	more careful leap.
	It is just like, you know, how our source of natural gas
	helped us in hard times. We reach out for water, for food, for
	support. These interconnections were just the same way. If
	you're impacted differently, there is a lot of support and
	supplies that can act--that can be accessed through these
	interconnections. And it actually did happen even during this
	crisis for parts of the interconnection bringing in some power
	from the Eastern into the midcontinent region as well.
	Ms. Wild. Dr. Jenkins, did you want to add something to
	that?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes. No, I second everything that Professor
	Rai just said. Just one thing to add is that I know that Texas
	has deliberately stayed out of the Eastern interconnection or
	Western interconnection in order to maintain its independent,
	State-run electricity markets. That could continue to be
	maintained while expanding direct-current inter-ties with the
	rest of the Eastern or Western interconnect. There are some
	existing transfer capacities between the two--between the
	Eastern interconnect and Texas and between Mexico and Texas.
	Those could be extended or expanded particularly into the West,
	and to the Western interconnect as well without synchronizing
	the ERCOT grid with the rest of the system. And so there's not
	really, you know, a tension there between greater--a greater
	ability to import and export power and the independence of the
	ERCOT market. And I think that's an area that Texas should
	consider how much of that investment is worthwhile going
	forward.
	Ms. Wild. OK. Well, thank you. That's very illuminating. I
	also wanted to focus on storage a little bit, which is one of
	the issues that energy sector executives in my district talk
	about all the time in connection with clean energy transition,
	the need for scalable, efficient, and affordable energy storage
	so that our grid will stay reliable. How would that kind of
	energy storage capacity have lessened the impact of the extreme
	weather in Texas?
	And my follow-up is what research questions should the
	scientific community and DOE investigate to ensure that energy
	storage capacity is resilient?
	Dr. Jenkins. So I would say that the bulk of the energy
	storage capacity we are adding to the grid today are lithium-
	ion batteries, the same kind of battery storage in electric
	vehicles. Those are very affordable and getting cheaper every
	year and provide a lot of flexibility on short timescales over
	the course of a few hours.
	Unfortunately, in this crisis if Texas had more battery
	storage capacity, it would've helped at the beginning of the
	crisis, but those batteries would have run out of power on
	Monday and, you know, not provided much more beyond that.
	So in terms of research needs, you know, there are other
	reliability and resiliency threats the shorter-duration
	batteries can help with other than these sustained outages and
	also longer-duration energy storage technologies that could
	provide sustained output for days or even weeks could
	potentially play a larger role in these sorts of events.
	But ultimately, you know, long events like this require
	firm generation capacity that can sustain its output without an
	energy limitation that storage has.
	Ms. Wild. Thank you. And, Dr. Rai, did you want to add
	anything to that in my last 15 seconds?
	Dr. Rai. Just very quickly that there is a very important
	need to also look at large-scale demand-side engagement and how
	that can be engaged even for longer durations because that's a
	very tough nut to crack with storage for a long time.
	Ms. Wild. Thank you so much. With that, I yield back,
	Madam Chair.
	Staff. Mr. Feenstra is next. We can't hear you, Mr.
	Feenstra. It looks like you have a headset connected.
	Staff. Mr. Feenstra, next to where you can mute and
	unmute, there's a little triangle or you can click on that and
	check and see what audio devices you are using. Still cannot
	hear you. No, sir, still cannot hear you.
	Mr. Feenstra. Can you hear me now?
	Staff. We can hear you.
	Mr. Feenstra. Sorry about that. I just wanted to say thank
	you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member Lucas. Before I start, I
	just wanted to thank each of the witnesses for their testimony
	and sharing their extensive research and educated opinions with
	us.
	You know, the weather this February in Iowa, you know, we
	saw a lot of the drastic things. Our temperatures dropped below
	28 below 0. We had 24 inches of snow. Part of my district, yes,
	we saw rolling blackouts and it was a pretty big deal. It's
	important that we all do what we can to protect and modernize
	the grid that we have to ensure the resiliency and protect from
	these large-scale rolling blackouts.
	So the question is for Dr. Jenkins. You highlighted the
	importance of clean electricity to an affordable transition to
	a net zero emissions economy in your testimony. My district in
	Iowa is one of the top wind energy areas in the country. New
	wind and solar generation is in our region but is tremendously
	bottlenecked by the transmission constraints. Mason City, a
	town in my district, will be the home to one of the two power
	converter stations for an organization called the SOO Green
	HVDC (high-voltage direct current) Link transmission line. This
	line will power renewable energy from Iowa into northern
	Illinois with--being connected with a PJM power market.
	So this is my question. How do we create transmission
	lines like this that create redundancy and increase clean
	energy availability and transport this energy to densely
	populated regions like the East Coast and Chicago and things
	like that? We're trying to do this in Iowa, but again, we have
	a tremendous bottlenecked that is going on with our
	transmission.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, as you know in Iowa and across much of
	the country we have an incredible American resource in the form
	of wind power, as well as solar energy potential across much of
	the country, but to use that effectively, we have to be able to
	bring that energy from where it's generated to where we consume
	it. It's much the same as with our natural gas and oil
	resources in the country or our coal resources where we have to
	build the natural gas pipelines and the rail lines to bring,
	you know, natural gas and coal to where we need it.
	And so a modern transmission system that is built to
	export wind and solar power from where it's cheapest to our
	cities is a critical piece of an affordable and more resilient
	electricity system that will benefit economically those
	exporting regions.
	And there are research needs as well that could help us
	improve the cost of direct-current transmission lines, the
	converter stations and other components of those systems, as
	well as identify cheaper ways to underground lines, which could
	help reduce public opposition to expansion.
	So it's a--maybe I'll defer to Ms. Tierney for more on the
	regulatory side of things, but there are significant research
	questions there for us to think about as well.
	Mr. Feenstra. And that's a great point. I mean, this line
	is an underground line running adjacent to the railroad
	system----
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes.
	Mr. Feenstra [continuing]. So it's a perfect line, secure
	and everything like that. I'm going to ask any one of you. I
	mean, what incentives would you look at it to try to create
	private-sector dollars to create these transmission lines?
	Dr. Tierney. Could I start by saying that in most
	instances it's not financial incentives that are the problem
	with bottlenecking the lines. It is really related to ensuring
	that there is public participation in the process and ensuring
	that there are regional issues that are taken into
	consideration in the siting of new transmission lines.
	The National Academies report has requested that Congress
	enact and declare a new national transmission policy that not
	just is about resiliency and reliability but it's also about
	opening up regions of the country with very high-quality wind
	resources, for example, and that that is something that should
	be taken into consideration when States and the Federal
	Government are acting to approve lines.
	The SOO line is pretty amazing in terms of how it was
	developed and sited, and I think it's a great example of the
	kinds that we should see in the future.
	Dr. Rai. Mr. Feenstra, if I could add quickly, one of the
	great examples of infrastructure investments in Texas has been
	bringing much of the wind that is generated in the western side
	of Texas into the load centers much to the south and the east,
	and that was done over a period of about a decade with over $7
	billion of investment. And that required as--just as, you know,
	Sue mentioned, a lot of public participation, as well as a very
	long and detailed regulatory process to get into that. But it
	was done and it has played a tremendous role in diversification
	of the energy system here in Texas and will be important in the
	future as well.
	Mr. Feenstra. Yes, thank you for both of your comments on
	that. I absolutely agree. I think the other big issue is a
	regulatory issue with SOO Energy and these organizations that
	are trying to do transmission lines. They're really struggling.
	It takes years to get regulatory approvals on these things, and
	if we could turn down that timeline, that would be fantastic.
	Thank you, and I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Bowman is next.
	Mr. Bowman. Thank you, Madam Chair and Ranking Member
	Lucas, and thank you to our witnesses.
	Dr. Rai, you emphasized a need for better communication
	and coordination in events like what happened in Texas and the
	need to organize a voluntary reduction of demand. When it comes
	to threats to the grid and energy shortages, do you have
	additional thoughts on how we can design emergency preparedness
	efforts so that they are truly community-driven and equitable?
	Are there any precedents for how this can work well that you
	have in mind while crafting your testimony?
	Dr. Rai. That's a great question, Mr. Bowman. I would like
	to just remind as--I was, you know, with my family during the
	crisis, and it was in utter chaos after a couple days in the
	household. Literally--and there was very little coordinated
	information that was coming to us. We were banking on neighbors
	and, you know, other friends for any little bit of information
	other than high-level system information.
	When--in times of--there is a lot of precedents. For
	example, in times of major hurricanes, there is a lot of great
	work that has happened in this country over the last several
	decades. There is a lot of great infrastructure and significant
	investment that goes on into weather forecasting and emergency
	system preparation. When ahead of time information is shared,
	then people pair up, people get ready and leave, get to safety.
	It does tie back to security concerns and in particular
	that is an added complexity in the electricity system. If an
	event like this further gets complicated, as was mentioned by
	Dr. Torres, that in events like this further in the restart
	process, in the black start process you have additional
	cybersecurity-related threats, that can really complicate
	matters a lot. So, you know, I would say when multiple events
	can really get out of control, really focusing on those events
	and crafting solutions that take those matters into
	consideration.
	Dr. Jenkins. Could I just add to that briefly----
	Dr. Tierney. Well, on the equity question----
	Dr. Jenkins. Sorry, go ahead, Sue.
	Mr. Bowman. Please.
	Dr. Tierney. Well, on the equity question there are things
	that utilities are doing around the country in vulnerable areas
	where there are disadvantaged populations. There are
	prepositioning of community heating or cooling centers where
	there's--that that will remain connected to the grid as a
	critical service area. There are prepositioning of crews to
	help with addressing restoration of service. And those are all
	part of a resilient grid, you know, planning and getting it
	ready for when you need it, and that's really important for
	folks who just really need electricity for heating and cooling.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, I was just going to echo that, that it's
	not just the resilience of the system but also our preparedness
	to respond when accidents and crises do strike that leads to
	the human cost of these crises, and so anticipating these kinds
	of extreme weather events and better preparing for them,
	particularly with a focus on the most vulnerable populations,
	can make a huge difference in the--you know, the economic and
	physical human toll of these kinds of events.
	Dr. Rai. Mr. Bowman, very quickly, one other point----
	Mr. Bowman. Yes.
	Dr. Rai [continuing]. Of the story is how much local
	community and local leaders got together and really got the
	State and our communities through this. It was one of the
	biggest, most powerful untold stories, but the truth is that in
	events like this, which might actually get more frequent, we
	cannot let it down to the households and the communities to
	always fend for themselves. There is need for Federal and State
	action at a very high level.
	Mr. Bowman. OK. Thank you all very much for those answers.
	I yield back my time.
	Staff. Mr. Obernolte is next.
	Mr. Obernolte. Well thank you very much to our panelists.
	This has been a fascinating discussion. My first question is
	for Dr. Jenkins. You said something in your testimony that I
	found very interesting. You attributed a lot of these failures
	to a failure to require contingency plans, and you said some
	interesting things about risk when you draw an analogy with
	insurance policies. So I wanted to ask you about that risk,
	because, in my home State of California, one of the risks to
	power generation is earthquakes, and what you quickly find is
	there is no way to completely insulate power generation from
	that risk. You know, you have to accept that a certain severity
	of earthquake is the one that you're planning for, and that,
	you know, that anything beyond that is going to affect your
	resiliency. And so I'm wondering, you know, how do we parse
	this risk? I mean, at what point do we say that we want our
	grid to be 99.99 percent resilient, but not .999 percent
	resilient because it would be too expensive? How do we do the
	math on that?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, I do think it's a challenging equation,
	and the threats that each region faces are going to be
	different, and that's one of the things I tried to emphasize in
	the testimony. So for Texas it might be these extreme cold
	events, but elsewhere it's wildfires, or earthquakes. So I'd
	say there's two things. One is to think about the relatively
	cost-effective measures that can be taken to push back that
	failure mode, so that it's a little bit stronger earthquake
	before things go down, or a little bit colder temperatures
	before the system fails, and there are a number of these
	measures that are quite affordable. You know, winterization of
	wind turbines, for example, heat tracing of critical sensors
	and feed pipes, for example, as resilience to cold, that
	could've been taken in Texas, indeed were pointed at in
	previous reports, and in many cases were just not taken or not
	maintained.
	And so there are some--first some affordable things that
	can be done to push back the breaking point. And then the
	second thing, which I think we're emphasizing in the response
	to Congressman Bowman's question, is that we also need to think
	about how we respond, and I think in earthquakes that's, you
	know, something California is well prepared for, right? The--
	you do know that earthquakes are a risk, and there are
	emergency and contingency plans in place. And I think what
	climate change means is that we have to check our blind spots
	on those kinds of, you know, weather-related risks because, you
	know, if the 2011 storm in Texas was used as the high water
	mark for, you know, for the threat, and the reality was that
	that was inadequate to plan for the severity of, you know, what
	could've been possible.
	So that's where future climate research that could
	better--help us better understand how those extreme threats are
	evolving, and what steps could be taken to better prepare for
	them would be very helpful, because the past----
	Mr. Obernolte. Sure.
	Dr. Jenkins [continuing]. As I said, is not a good guide
	for the future anymore.
	Mr. Obernolte. Right. Well, I think your point is that
	there were steps that could and should have been taken in Texas
	that were reasonably cost-effective, but I think everyone needs
	to realize that a 100 percent resilient grid is statistically
	impossible, and at----
	Dr. Jenkins. Exactly, yeah.
	Mr. Obernolte [continuing]. Some point you're going to get
	to a level where the additional cost is not worth the reduction
	in risk. So----
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. And----
	Mr. Obernolte [continuing]. There's always going to be a
	point at which, you know, the grid could statistically fail.
	Dr. Jenkins. That's right, and that's why I'm--in the
	response side of things too, because it's a question of cost
	and the, you know, the risk your mitigating, and if you can use
	operational strategies and responses to these crises when
	they--when systems do fail to minimize the cost, then that also
	means you're less vulnerable as well, so it's both sides of the
	equation that we have to pay attention to.
	Mr. Obernolte. Right. Thank----
	Dr. Rai. Mr.--if I may add a couple points here? I would
	just want to remind that there were three major things that
	could have been done that did not really require a massive, you
	know, long-term investment or rethinking. I mean, I had already
	pointed out--you know. Winterization does also include engaging
	with demand, as well as, you know, very simple things, as, you
	know, what really is your critical load, right? Keeping track
	would have been very simple.
	Something I think is very important to keep in mind, as I
	mentioned in my testimony, the scale of the damages, right? You
	know, we cannot just look at, you know, what was, you know,
	what was the value of the loss to--there are damages to water
	infrastructure, there are economic damages, there are
	governments, you know, local governments failing, and when you
	bring those things in, early estimates are putting that over
	$100 billion, and my back of the envelope calculations say even
	if you were to require winterization of the entire gas and
	power infrastructure, it is not going to be of the same state.
	It's going to be an order of magnitude lower, right? So, you
	know, you need to keep both sides of the equation in mind to
	really find out what the balance is.
	Mr. Obernolte. Sure, yeah. I think we all can agree on
	that. And, Dr. Rai, while I've got you here, let me ask a last
	question. You said something in your testimony I thought was
	very interesting, which was that one of the biggest failures,
	in your opinion, was a lack of voluntary demand reduction. And
	I just wanted to ask, you know, how we would go about affecting
	voluntary demand reduction, because the traditional way is to
	do it through market pricing, which happened in some parts of
	Texas. And I think in retrospect we look at that and realize
	that it was too quick, people didn't realize the high price
	that they were paying for power, and that probably that's not a
	good way of going about it in the future. So how should we go
	about it?
	Dr. Rai. That's a great question. Voluntary reduction
	doesn't mean it should be free, you know, it--just that, you
	know, it was not--you can't enforce it, but when there are
	disruptions of this scale--and just as you mentioned, you
	cannot completely 100 percent proof things, so we should be
	expecting disruptions like this here and elsewhere. In those
	types of situation, really engaging in messaging, and engaging
	that demand becomes very important. And I have offered--I don't
	pretend to have all the solutions, but that's so important,
	such a big possible part of the question, that it needs to be
	studied further.
	Mr. Obernolte. Yeah. Well, in other parts of the country
	we have voluntary reduction programs where, in return for a
	lower electric rate, large industrial consumers agree to, on
	demand, reduce their consumption, right? But I don't think that
	that is on a scale that would be big enough to solve the
	problem in Texas. So, it's something that certainly bears
	further discussion, because I don't see how we get from where
	we are to where we want to be.
	Dr. Tierney. And much more social science research.
	Ms. Garza [continuing]. In on that. I'm sorry, Sue. If I
	could chime in on that, you know, ERCOT is a summer-focused
	electric system, and we do have significant demand programs
	reacting and responsive to the--in the summertime. And one of
	the limitations was the, you know, the limitations of those
	programs and those services, their availability in the winter,
	so----
	Mr. Obernolte. Well, great. Well, I see we're out of time,
	but thank you very much for your testimony. It's been a
	fascinating discussion. I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Casten is next.
	Mr. Casten. Thank you, Madam Chair, and it's so nice to
	see so many old friends on this panel from my prior life in the
	energy world. Want to start with a couple questions for Dr.
	Jenkins, a couple short ones, and one sort of medium one. First
	one, El Paso had about the same weather. Did they have any
	outages in this recent period?
	Dr. Jenkins. I don't believe there were any rolling
	blackouts, but I could be wrong about that.
	Mr. Casten. Is there a simple reason for that?
	Dr. Jenkins. Well, I'm not sure it's a purely simple
	reason, but they are connected to the rest of the Western
	Interconnect, and so they could draw power from much further
	away, and conditions were not quite so cold.
	Mr. Casten. So they're outside of ERCOT?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. They also, I think, took more
	proactive steps to weatherize their system, and I understand
	it.
	Mr. Casten. So, to that point, I'd like to ask unanimous
	consent to introduce a document for the record. It's entitled
	``Outages And Curtailments During The Southwest Cold Event Of
	February 1 Through 5, 2011'' from FERC and NERC. Dr. Jenkins,
	are you familiar with this report?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, I am.
	Mr. Casten. It strikes me that some of their
	recommendations talking about what should have happened in
	1989, and weren't done in 2011 and is it safe to characterize
	this report as saying that the events that recently happened in
	Texas were not only foreseeable, but were actually foreseen?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yes, I think that's correct. You could almost
	do a find and replace for the dates in the 2011 study and
	replace 1989 with 2011, and 2011 with 2021, and it would still
	read, you know, very similar to the reports that I'm sure will
	be released after this event. It's kind of eerie.
	Mr. Casten. Well, I raise that because I really want to
	impress on my colleagues to please read this report, because
	there is an understandable political bias for everybody to say
	we couldn't have seen this coming, and we did, and we need to
	make sure that we incorporate those recommendations.
	Somewhat meatier question for you, and I do want to get
	one question for Dr. Tierney, so I apologize--brief here, the
	North American Reliability Council imposes all sorts of
	requirements on load serving entities on the electric grid that
	have--requirements for backup generation, and redundant
	transmission, and one in--1 day in 10 years outage
	requirements, you know, all those details. Is there an
	equivalent standard for natural gas infrastructure?
	Dr. Jenkins. Not that I'm aware of, but I'd defer to the
	other panelists if they know more.
	Mr. Casten. Well----
	Dr. Tierney. No, there is no such reliability organization
	or standard for the gas industry.
	Mr. Casten. So as we get to grids that are more gas
	dependent, should we be thinking about something like a
	standard like that for the gas industry? Because it strikes me
	that that's the weak point in our system. And, Dr. Tierney, I
	have a follow-up question for you, but since you jumped in, go
	ahead.
	Dr. Tierney. Yeah. I want to make sure to highlight the
	recommendation of the 2021 National Academies study on the
	future of the grid, where we call for Congress to do exactly
	that. So it's a very important thing, given this
	interdependency between the two energy systems.
	Mr. Casten. So I want to pivot there, and, Dr. Tierney,
	I'm glad you jumped in, because, as a fellow former New
	Englander, the--I've always thought of ERCOT as being the New
	England ISO with less interconnect and more electric heating,
	as far as the dynamics that affect it. And, you know, I mention
	that because we have these issues where, when systems get
	tight, gas is preferentially dispatched for heating, as it was,
	except that in New England there isn't this huge surge of
	electric heating load that comes on.
	And as we think about how to do what we must do to get to
	a zero carbon future, we've got a national policy that broadly
	talks about let's get to zero carbon in the electric sector as
	soon as we can, and then let's ``electrify everything.'' And
	Texas is in many ways sort of a microcosm, if not all the way
	down that path, but the beginning of it, because loads that are
	done--that are served with other fuels in the rest of the grid
	are significantly served with electricity in Texas, and we've
	got that constraint on the system.
	As we talk about an infrastructure while going forward,
	the--given as the, you know, if my math is right, you know,
	roughly--a little less than 40 percent of the total energy
	used--this country for electricity, almost 50 percent is for
	heating, in the industrial--commercial industrial sector. If we
	are going to electrify everything, and we are going to shift to
	a zero carbon electric grid, the implication is that we are
	massively increasing our generation fleet, we are massively
	relocating the generation fleet, and we're massively relocating
	where the load is, and we'd better be talking about
	transmission.
	So what should we be thinking about--this--set aside who
	pays. What is the quantum of money we need to be thinking
	about, round to the nearest $10 billion if you need to, to
	invest in a transmission system that is actually going to
	enable us to connect clean generation to an electrified load?
	Dr. Tierney. I don't have my number at my fingertips, but
	I would be happy to provide you with information after the
	hearing, if that would be helpful. I completely agree with you
	that transmission plays an absolutely critical role here. We
	know from many NREL studies, where Dr. Torres is located, that
	bigger regions interconnected, and transmission-enabling those
	bigger regions to perform, is really important. Where you are
	living today, there are these various interconnections across
	different regional transmission organizations. Those need to be
	bulked up, and certainly New England is interested in enhancing
	its transmission capability to a variety of diverse areas where
	there are high quality--in a stimulus package there can be
	things that Congress would adopt as part of financial
	incentives to get shovels, or, let's see, electrical wires put
	in place on the system.
	Dr. Jenkins. If I could add to that, Representative
	Casten, the Net Zero America study that I helped publish at
	Princeton, which looked at this transition over the next decade
	toward a net zero emissions economy, estimated on the order of
	$350 billion in incremental investment in transmission over the
	next decade alone. That'd be about a 60 percent increase in
	transmission capacity over the next 10 years. This is a huge
	undertaking, a huge opportunity for investment and job creation
	as part of an infrastructure package.
	Mr. Casten. All right. I'd love to follow up with all of
	you. I'm out of time, but I do just want to leave this to
	comment here that the scale of what we are talking about in
	transmission in our infrastructure plan is a tiny, tiny, tiny
	fraction of that, and we don't start to grapple with the
	numbers you're talking about, we're going to be wrong-footed.
	So let's continue the conversation. Thank you, and I yield
	back.
	Mr. Torres. Mr. Casten, if I could just throw something in
	there? There's a set of electrification future studies that
	we've been conducting with the Department of Energy that really
	helped you--helps us understand how the loads will grow across
	the different sectors, and that would be very useful in the
	planning. Thank you.
	Mr. Casten. Thank you.
	Staff. Mr. Garcia is next.
	Mr. Garcia. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you, Madam
	Chairwoman, and Ranking Member Lucas, for pulling this
	together, and thanks to the witnesses. This is an absolutely
	critical discussion, and what we saw in Texas last month was a
	tragedy. It was heartbreaking, and, in my opinion, was
	something that we, as Americans, should have been able to
	prevent.
	I represent a district in Southern California that these
	types of scenarios are not foreign to us, unfortunately. It's
	not necessarily the extreme cold, but in our case it's the
	extreme heat, and it's the winds, that have led to, in my
	district, close to 30 power outages in the last--call it 10
	months. We don't live in Venezuela. We live in the United
	States of America, yet our utilities behave, and the public
	utility companies responsible for power generation in our
	State, behave as if it is Venezuela. These problems are a
	product of challenges provided by Mother Nature, but it is
	mankind, and the folks responsible for our utility companies,
	and those who represent us in government, who are responsible
	for the failure. We have failed to overcome the challenges that
	Mother Nature has provided, and I resonate with the comments by
	my colleague, Mr. Casten, that this is a repeated lesson
	learned over the last several decades.
	In my district we lose power when the winds get above 30
	miles per hour. That's not a scenario that one would call a
	force majeure. That's not an anomaly, especially not in
	Southern California. That happens on a very frequent basis.
	We've lost lives, we've risked thousands of lives, we've been
	surrounded by flames while we have no power, and we've been
	effectively not only losing our power, but also our water,
	because many of my constituents are on wells that are
	electrically driven.
	So my question to the panel, and I think we can start with
	Mr. Torres, is how do we ensure that we're not playing whack-a-
	mole here across all 50 States and our territories? How do we
	ensure that what we saw in Texas doesn't happen in other
	States? Maybe not for the same reasons, maybe for different
	reasons, and that these lessons learned that you are collecting
	as a result of the incidents in February in Texas are being
	disseminated? And it may not be for cold weather, but this grid
	hardening and the lessons learned, what venues, what media
	forum, summits, and/or discussions are you having to make sure
	that the lessons learned from Texas, California, and other
	States are being applied to the rest of the United States so
	that we're not playing whack-a-mole here indefinitely?
	Mr. Torres. All right, thank you, Mr. Garcia. I can't
	speak to all the things that are going on. I can talk to some
	of the things that we've been doing within--in realm of the
	Department of the Energy through the GMI activities and grid
	modernization--those are strong collaborations across the
	industry with the utilities, with the vendors, the various
	stakeholders. And I fully agree with you that we really have a
	patchwork of perspectives and policies across the different
	elements of the grid, and there needs to be more communication,
	discussion, as to what are the roles, responsibilities, and the
	implications of those differences? Because we're all trying to
	achieve a common good here. We all want our lights to stay on.
	We want to avoid major events like this, and so we need to
	understand what should each part be for every member? What can
	we be doing? And what are the changes that we're--that the
	different participants are implying? How could that affect the
	overall resilience of the grid? And can there be opportunities
	for shared costs, shared investments? Those kinds of
	discussions I totally agree need to continue so that we can
	avoid and mitigate some of these kinds of disasters.
	Mr. Garcia. Thank you, sir, and I would just submit to
	this body, and all of us at the Federal level, that our
	investments in research into the grid hardening and expansion
	efforts should include not only the conduits of power between
	cities and generation plants, but also conduits between
	entities and bureaucrats who are responsible for making sure
	lessons learned are proliferated as well.
	I personally believe that we need to hold the public
	utility companies accountable for this. This is negligence.
	This is loss of life. This was foreseeable in many cases, and
	we as Americans deserve better than this. I thank, again, the
	Chairwoman for opening the aperture on this a little bit
	further, and I just want to reinforce to my colleagues that
	this is not a problem unique to Texas. We will lose more
	Americans in other States as we start seeing some of these
	incidents expand across the Nation. I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Foster is next.
	Mr. Foster. Well, thank you, and first, to my colleagues
	from Texas and to some of our witnesses, I feel your pain, as I
	too had a daughter and son-in-law trapped in Austin, and living
	off their automobile battery for days. And I'd like to mention
	their No. 1 recommendation, which is that everyone in Texas be
	given at least a rudimentary understanding on how to drive a
	car on roads after a snow or ice storm. OK, not the subject of
	our hearing, but an important point.
	Now, Mr. Torres and Mr. Jenkins, you mentioned a number of
	threats to grid reliability, including weather, EMP, wildfires,
	and others. Many of these can be ameliorated by undergrounding
	the utilities, an approach which carries multiple secondary
	benefits like eliminating eyesores, improving real estate
	property values, you know, preventing wildfires, and so on. So
	what are the promising directions of Federal R&D into lowering
	the cost of undergrounding utilities? You know, I'm thinking
	of, like, swarms of robots that toil away underground to bury
	utilities, both in urban and rural areas, or just simply lower
	cost conductor/insulator power conversion strategies for high
	voltage DC lines, and so on.
	You know, are there specific programs that have been
	defined for--that could absorb increase Federal funding for
	this research, you know, given that industry is pretty
	conservative in what it's willing to invest in? You know, what
	would an underground power transmission moon shot look like? So
	any one of you want to take a stab at that?
	Mr. Torres. I can't say that I'm an expert on underground
	DC systems. One of the biggest challenges is the access in the
	siting to that. There definitely can be further investments to
	advance the various technologies, to improve on that, to
	improve on the conductor materials, and so on. There also can
	be done things at a local level. You know, the--underground
	lines can, you know, appear at the transmission and
	distribution level as well. There are places where flooding
	could be an issue. So you really need to understand where this
	kind of technology makes sense as well, and if it will actually
	resolve the issue, and weigh out the costs overall.
	But I believe in looking at a portfolio of options,
	including DC lines, including undergrounding, including
	microgrids. So I think we're at a point in the evolution of
	technology, and research, and information here that we have
	many more possibilities, so I would just caution that we not
	select just one particular pathway.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, maybe just one thing to add for the
	Committee is to understand that direct current lines are a
	little bit like the--getting on the highway, where you can only
	get on and off at certain on and off ramps, and those are the
	DC--you know, AC to DC converter stations, that we need to hook
	up these lines to our synchronized AC grid. And there are
	significant opportunities for innovation in cost reductions in
	those converter stations which could allow us to make better
	use of HVDC lines embedded within our broader AC transmission
	system, so I think that is an area for research that could be,
	you know, increased funding could go a long way.
	Mr. Foster. Yeah. Well, if there had been specific plans
	made for, you know, a program that could absorb significant--
	larger funding, and, you know, cost production research,
	basically, because it seems like a big part of that technology
	has really not changed in the 1960's. And I think, you know, if
	you look for example, at the cost production in microwaves, you
	know, we bought a microwave oven, which is, you know, a
	magnetron in a metal box with a timer, and that's, you know, a
	drop from $250 of 1960 dollars to about $42 today, you know,
	not through revolutionary technology, but simply step by step
	cost reduction, and I think that that's really an area where we
	could benefit from investment.
	And if in a moment I can have an estimate of my time left
	from the staff, I would--it would be useful.
	Staff. 1 minute, Mr. Foster.
	Mr. Foster. OK. So many of the really destructive
	scenarios to the grid, you know, whether they're cyber attacks
	or accidental, have to do with messing around with
	synchronizing the phase or frequency of the AC generation and
	distribution systems. You know, in contrast, DC transport
	systems, you know, can be protected by relatively simple
	systems, you know, like diode clamps, over-voltage protection,
	so on, that don't rely on software that can be corrupted, and
	can be much more easily made immune to natural and artificial
	electromagnetic pulse events and so on. Has this been looked
	at, really, the benefits in terms of disaster resilience, of
	high voltage--or DC systems generally compared to AC systems?
	Dr. Tierney. Could I answer very briefly by saying that
	there has been a lot of research on the technical and
	regulatory issues associated with HDVC--DC lines. But I think
	your question and comments really calls out for asking DOE to
	do a moon shot type road map for that kind of research that
	would really take things over the hump. As one thinks about the
	expansion of the system that is going to be required, and the
	natural resistance that people have to the visual effects of
	new power lines, I think it is a really important area of
	work----
	Mr. Foster. Thank you, my----
	Dr. Tierney [continuing]. From a scientific basis.
	Mr. Foster. Thank you. And so I will--happy to collaborate
	with any of my colleagues on brainstorming what that would look
	like. And my time is up, and I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Babin is next.
	Mr. Babin. Yes, sir, thank you so very much. Really
	appreciate you witnesses being here to talk about something
	that is so important.
	When Winter Storm Uri swept across and through Texas,
	thousands of my constituents, and millions across the State,
	found themselves in life and death circumstances, without heat,
	without water, and access to essential goods, in the coldest
	storm in modern Texas history. We must address the failures and
	subsequently support policies that make sure that this
	catastrophe never happens again. I'd also like to thank Mr.
	Foster for his suggestion, because many Texans do not know how
	to drive in these conditions, thankfully, because they're so
	very rare in the State of Texas.
	But our energy sources must be predictable, dependable,
	and affordable. Unfortunately, the national trend of increasing
	regulatory policies and green energy subsidies has led to
	States, in this case Texas, incorporating more unreliable power
	into the grid while decreasing reliance on proven and
	dependable base load energy resources. We must recognize the
	limits of energy sources such as wind and solar. If Texas had
	been on the grid that was 100 percent renewable, as many
	continue to advocate for, this weather scenario would have been
	much worse. Thankfully natural gas, which is a vital
	contributor to our Texas grid, would carry the lion's share of
	the load of this energy emergency.
	And so, Madam Chair, I ask unanimous consent to submit for
	the record a one-page fact sheet from the American Exploration
	and Production Council, which details the role of natural gas
	during this February's winter event.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Without objection.
	Mr. Babin. Thank you. So what is the solution? I firmly
	believe that market-based solutions would better ensure
	increased grid resiliency. As Pat Woods, previous FERC
	Chairman, said recently, I can assure you the competitive model
	is the better way to bring price, service, and technological
	innovation benefits to the customers.
	And so let me also briefly mention that many continue to
	say the source of the blackouts was Texas's insistence on being
	part of an independent grid, thus depriving it of ample power
	from local States and ``wise'' regulation from the Federal
	Government. But joining the Federal grid is not the solution,
	and would have far-reaching consequences, which would include
	greater market volatility, and much higher prices.
	My question to Mr. Garza, if the oil fields have attempted
	to become more green friendly, they have electrified. Should
	there be more research and development into microgrids or non-
	grid electricity? Part of the reason gas couldn't get out of
	the ground during this storm was because the devices to get it
	out of the ground simply ran out of electricity. Do you believe
	that forcing these different types of energy sources to all
	become electric is the right direction to be heading in?
	Ms. Garza. Well, sir, thank you for your--thank you for
	that question. Yes, there certainly were situations where gas
	production and transportation facilities where--which are
	dependent on electricity found their electricity cutoff. And I
	would attribute that to a failure of communication, or a
	failure of understanding by the local distribution utility that
	they indeed had a critical gas production facility connected to
	their system. An example that came out during the recent
	legislative hearings here in Texas is that one of the utilities
	had about 30 gas facilities on their critical load list before
	the event, and during the event they identified 130 more. So
	clearly there's a failure of identification, and, given the
	interdependence of electricity and gas, the codependence of
	electricity and gas, we need to figure out a way to improve
	that communication and coordination.
	Mr. Babin. Thank you, ma'am. And then do you also believe
	that the current trajectory of research and development funding
	is doing enough to ensure that we achieve better grid
	resiliency?
	Ms. Garza. Well, I, you know, I always think there's more
	to do and more to learn. Clearly we, you know, we failed that
	test here in Texas, and so we need to learn from those lessons,
	and we need to figure out how those lessons can be broadly
	applied to the rest of the country. And, to me, it seems we do
	that through appropriate research and dissemination.
	Dr. Tierney. Mr. Babin?
	Mr. Babin. All right, thank you very much, and I think--
	yes, ma'am?
	Dr. Tierney. I just wanted to say, clearly the National
	Academies committees on resilience of the grid and the future
	of the electric system believe that there needs to be at least
	a doubling, if not a tripling, of parts of the research chain,
	so I encourage that to your attention.
	Mr. Babin. OK. Thank you very much, and I see that I'm out
	of time, so I will yield back. Thank you, Madam Chair.
	Staff. Mr. Kildee is next.
	Mr. Kildee. Thank you. Well, first of all, thanks for
	holding this hearing. It's obviously an important hearing. I
	would like to address--and this is something that my colleague
	from Michigan, Ms. Stevens, raised, and it has to do with the
	effect of the development of electrication--electrification of
	transportation of the--of our entire fleet of vehicles over
	many decades will have on grid resilience, or what factors we
	need to consider when it comes to that inevitable development.
	And so I wonder if, Mr. Torres, if you wouldn't mind perhaps
	reiterating, because I missed part of the answer that you
	gave--or that was given when Ms. Stevens raised this issue, if
	you would mind just giving us some of the thoughts that we need
	to consider regarding grid resilience in the era of obvious
	development and movement toward electrification of vehicles?
	And then I do have an interesting question as to whether
	or not there's another side to that coin, especially when it
	comes to heavy duty vehicles, when we think about the fact
	that, in a case like this, perhaps on a smaller scale, we would
	have present on the ground, in communities, large--essentially
	batteries on wheels. Fully charged vehicles, school buses, for
	example, that might be of some utility in providing temporary
	relief in the case of, you know, of a blackout of some type. So
	if you could just touch on those two areas, I'd appreciate it.
	Mr. Torres. Yes, thank you, Mr. Kildee. So what we're
	seeing in some of the studies I mentioned, early
	electrification future studies is--there's a high potential for
	transportation to be a significant new load on the grid, and we
	see that there would probably need to be some changes on--at
	the distribution level, when--where we charge, but even
	charging management systems so not everybody would come home
	and charge at exactly the same time. Maybe people are charging
	at night, but you can do it at a different time. So all those
	kinds of things are definitely achievable with some more
	research.
	With regards to things like vehicles providing support,
	you know, it's--there's a potential with fleets, with bus
	fleets, that are maybe only driving certain times, say school
	buses, but then they sit there most of the day. During that
	time they could potentially offer some energy to the grid to
	help support it during time of need. Other, you know, light
	duty vehicles, we'd need to understand in the future, when you
	have dynamic generation locations, where are these vehicles,
	and can they plug in to some, you know, some portal where they
	could offer some support to the grid? Those kinds of things
	would still need to be looked at, business models and so on.
	But given the fact that, you know, transportation is on a
	path to at least some level of increased electrification, I
	think it offers opportunity for us to look at how it can be
	used to add grid resilience, what are the implications if we
	don't take into account the growth for light duty and heavy
	duty vehicles? Light duty vehicles at 150 kilowatt level
	charging, you know, heavy duty up to a megawatt scale charging,
	could have large impacts on the grid. At the same time, if we
	do it wisely, could also potentially add some support.
	Dr. Rai. Mr. Kildee, if I may add a couple points? The
	increasing trend in electrification for transportation
	highlights one additional interdependence. We already talked
	about how gas, electricity, and then food and water are
	connected. We are seeing another, transportation sector,
	getting--so the interdependencies are going to get more
	complicated. So that's point one. Second, your observation is
	absolutely right on. The University of Texas have had
	demonstration project that have showed that using buses and
	similar--what you mentioned, storage--you could actually
	support fire stations and similar infrastructure for certain
	durations of time, right? You know, not for very long. And the
	third piece is your comment around large vehicles. That brings
	an additional element, which is hydrogen. Especially it's very
	important for Texas, there's a lot of scope there, but it also
	adds to that diversification of, you know, energy sources, and
	supply during a, you know, critical time. So, you know, that's
	a really very promising avenue as well.
	Mr. Kildee. Well, thank you. I appreciate those comments.
	Only 2 percent right now of American vehicles are electric
	vehicles, but we know where the market is going, and we
	actually have this moment in time to prepare for that future,
	to begin to set the stage for not only greater resilience, but
	less dependency, and a cleaner environment, so this is a timely
	hearing. I thank the Chairwoman for raising it, and I
	particularly thank the panelists for really good testimony. So
	thank you, and I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. LaTurner is next.
	Mr. LaTurner. Thank you, Madam Chair, and Ranking Member
	Lucas, for holding this hearing, and I want to thank the
	panelists for being with us. Like many of its neighbors, the
	State of Kansas was hit hard by the winter storm in February.
	Subjected to sub-zero temperatures, many were without power and
	heat for days. Power and fuel sources that we rely on every day
	failed, and we weren't prepared. We cannot allow this to happen
	again. It is my hope that this hearing will shed light on
	future opportunities to strengthen and fortify our power grid
	against threats both physical and cyber, and examine how we can
	leverage our country's research and development capabilities to
	make those opportunities a reality.
	I'd like Mr. Torres and Ms. Garza to address this
	question. It's a two-part question. How interconnected are the
	various regional grids? And, while you consider that, the
	connectivity of the grids, what is the probability that an
	outage or a cyber event in one part of the country can have a
	cascading effect on the whole system?
	Mr. Torres. OK, I'll go ahead and go first. Thank you, Mr.
	LaTurner. So there are only, you know, a small set of DC ties
	interconnecting the eastern and western interconnect, and then
	there's also a tie between--I believe there's a Texas and an
	eastern interconnect. Not a lot of power flows between those
	systems at this point. They don't really depend on power flows
	going across. So, at this point, not a lot of dependency, from
	that perspective.
	The--with regards to some of the cybersecurity potential
	issues here, the potential consequences would depend on the
	type of event, where the entry was, what system was
	compromised. The grid is really made up of a whole bunch of
	small grids, there's a lot of different utilities, so, you
	know, we're always as--you know, we're as strong as our weakest
	link, so having some consistency on the expectations in
	policies, and even technologies and approaches, is really good.
	I'd say as a whole we're doing a pretty good job at the bulk
	grid level. NERC has jurisdiction over the larger utilities.
	You know, they're providing power over the bulk grid, the high
	voltage level.
	Once you get down to the distribution level, you know,
	they are doing the best they can as well. They are, you know,
	developing standards and so on, but they don't necessarily have
	the same level of resources. So finding ways to levelize and
	provide--given that, you know, potentially a connection
	anywhere can be a connection everywhere if cybersecurity is not
	managed appropriately.
	There was a--I guess the first power grid outage caused by
	a cyber attack in 2015 in Ukraine. Could that happen here?
	Don't know. We've been, you know, in my career I've been
	looking at this since the 1990's, and the grid has evolved
	considerably since. I will say that I don't believe that's
	we're paying attention--enough attention to what the threats
	are ahead, because we don't know how quickly the cyber threat
	is evolving. It's evolving very, very quickly, so we need to
	really move toward more inherently resilient systems, knowing
	that we don't always know where that next attack is coming
	from, or even what it might be, but the system would be
	resilient, be able to isolate and detect something's wrong, and
	be able to reconstruct, and get the system back up and running
	as soon as possible.
	Mr. LaTurner. I appreciate that. And, Ms. Garza, if you
	don't mind?
	Ms. Garza. Yeah, sure. From an interconnected standpoint,
	we've talked about Texas's limited direct current
	interconnections with the Eastern Interconnect, and a few with
	Mexico as well. The thing of these different grids is that they
	are operated synchronously, that is they're moving together,
	and the DC connection allows that separateness, allows those
	synchronous operations to be separated.
	If--so in this situation, if we had some more connections
	to the Eastern Interconnect, I'm not sure that that would've
	been very helpful because all of the regions around us to the
	north and to the east were suffering their own issues, as you
	just alluded to in Kansas, and all the way down into Louisiana.
	The cold weather descended across the center of the country. So
	incrementally I'm not sure there would've been much opportunity
	for improvement. If you were talking about sort of national
	bulk high capacity, the HVDC lines, you know, broadly across
	the country, yes, that might have been valuable. I'm not sure
	you could justify that expense just on a winter resilience need
	in Texas, or more locally, but there are other benefits of that
	kind of interconnection as well.
	Mr. LaTurner. Thank you both very much. I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Beyer is next.
	Mr. Beyer. Thank you very much. I'd like to start with Dr.
	Jenkins, and--with a sort of foundational existential question,
	Dr. Jenkins. Now, you're a MIT Ph.D., which I very much
	respect, so here's the question. We have this feedback loop. We
	burn fossil fuels, which are amazingly efficient, lots of BTUs
	concentrated--which leads to climate change and global warming,
	which leads to extreme events, and then we adapt to this by
	burning more fossil fuel. Does this make any sense, and is this
	not the equivalent of smashing your hand with a hammer,
	noticing that it hurts and is bleeding, so keep hammering
	harder?
	Dr. Jenkins. Well, it's a little bit--and the challenge is
	a little bit, to use a different metaphor, like trying to build
	the airplane while flying it, right? So we have to keep our
	critical infrastructures and our economy going as we transition
	as quickly and affordably as possible to a cleaner energy
	system that breaks that link. And so we can't do that
	overnight, but we can move much faster than we have
	historically, and that means both greater reliance on variable
	renewable resources, as well as cleaner firm technologies that
	can supplant fossil fuels, or could even allow us to continue
	to use fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration.
	Mr. Beyer. So, Dr. Jenkins, let me continue on this theme.
	And I know you're not a regulator, you're a scientist, but
	Governor Abbott said in a statement yesterday that he'd asked
	for and accepted the head of the PUC's, the Public Utility
	Commission's, resignation, and this was after the Texas Monthly
	reported that he had told out of state investors, think Wall
	Street, on a telephone call that he would work to ``throw the
	weight of the Commission behind stopping calls to reverse
	billions of dollars in overcharges for wholesale electricity
	during the storms.'' It turns out that ERCOT had forgotten to
	roll back its prices from the sky-high levels as the power came
	back on. And--independent agency originally thought it was only
	a $16 billion overcharge. They've dialed it back to $6 billion
	in overcharges. So, Dr. Jenkins, here's the thought, was ERCOT
	actually designed to protect ratepayers?
	Dr. Jenkins. Well, this is--there's a separate question, I
	think, is whether the Utility Commission of Texas was, you
	know, seeing its primary responsibility as to the people of
	Texas or to the investors in the power system. ERCOT runs the
	electricity market, but it's regulated by the Utility
	Commission of Texas, which now has no members, even to figure
	out how to, you know, navigate after this crisis. So I think it
	is a shame to see the sort of, you know, vacancy at the
	Commission now, at a time when we need regulators to be acting
	on behalf of the public.
	Mr. Beyer. Although it is encouraging to see a bipartisan
	effort to make sure that the ratepayers are protected now,
	after the fact.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah.
	Mr. Beyer. Dr. Jenkins, would Texas benefit from a
	capacity market, you know, the so-called forward markets, where
	we would pay for building capacity, not just for selling
	electricity?
	Dr. Jenkins. I think that's an important and open
	question. I think, you know, we have to be a little bit careful
	about thinking about different financial incentives alone as
	sufficient to ensure weatherization measures. You have to
	remember that a lot of the generators that went out during this
	crisis were hedged, so they were actually obligated to pay back
	the power that they couldn't generate at the market rate of
	$9,000 a megawatt hour. So they had an enormous incentive to be
	available, and suffered millions in dollars in losses when they
	weren't. So I'm not convinced that a capacity market, which
	would provide different incentives for, you know, for providing
	firm capacity, would've fundamentally changed those incentives.
	The financial incentives were pretty strong.
	What I think this was was a failure of regulation,
	honestly, to require certain measures that were cost-effective,
	and could provide broad public benefits by avoiding these sorts
	of crises for the, you know, the catastrophic impacts on the
	public writ large that are much larger than the impacts that
	any individual power plant would face. So we have a public good
	here to reliability, and I think that ultimately requires
	regulation to ensure--the benefit of a capacity market is that
	it gives you one more point of regulation, where participation
	in that capacity market, and getting payments, you know, long-
	term payments for capacity could be contingent on compliance
	with certain regulations regarding weatherization, and we've
	seen those kinds of steps taken in other markets, like New
	England, where they require either firm gas contracts, or dual
	fuel capacity for, you know, gas plants that can switch over to
	oil. So that--it would be another point of regulation, but I
	don't think changing the financial incentives alone would be
	sufficient.
	Mr. Beyer. Would capacity markets have any role in
	encouraging the diversification of the energy sources?
	Dr. Jenkins. Not necessarily. Capacity markets don't
	necessarily lead to greater diversity. In fact, they primarily
	benefit natural gas power generators in their current design.
	We have to think carefully about how we design these long run
	incentives. They're ostensibly technology neutral, but as Jacob
	Mays, and Dick O'Neil at FERC, and others have shown, the
	specific single contract that they offer is well-aligned with
	the risk profile of gas generators, and other generators face
	different risks, and so we need more long-term products to
	address the different risk profiles that they each face in
	order to ensure more diversity.
	Mr. Beyer. Great. Thank you very much. I yield back.
	Staff. Ms. Kim is next.
	Ms. Kim. Thank you. Thank you, Ranking Member, and
	Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this hearing today. You know,
	unfortunately, my home State of California heavily relies on
	imported power from other States to help field electricity
	demand. According to the Wall Street Journal article from
	August 2020, California's grid operator must find 10,000 to
	15,000 megawatts replacement power during a period where
	generation of solar and wind power falls off. The combination
	of wildfires, and increased demand due to the COVID-19
	pandemic, and rising temperatures were a perfect storm, causing
	power outages in California last summer. And, regrettably,
	our--as our State looks to purchase more energy from other
	States and abroad, California plans to shut down the Diablo
	Canyon power plant at a time when we need a good mix of energy
	sources.
	So I would like to pose the question to all witnesses--
	grid scale storage will be a key technology driver for security
	and resiliency as new energy sources are incorporated into the
	U.S. power grid. So I would like to hear from each of you your
	perspectives, are there areas of this research that are better
	off left to the private industry?
	Dr. Jenkins. If I could begin, maybe? I think that the
	history of American innovation around particularly energy
	technologies is one of active public and private partnership.
	So the innovation often occurs from private sector businesses,
	but they're critically supported throughout the entire
	evolution of that technology by investment on behalf of the
	public in R&D, in demonstration, in early market opportunities
	in the forms of procurement, or tax credits, or standards that
	drive technology. And all of those together help provide the
	innovative opportunity for the private sector to develop these
	new technologies. So it's really partnership, and it's one that
	America excels at, and it's got us cheap wind and solar power,
	electric vehicle batteries, LEDs (light-emitting diodes),
	hydraulic fracturing, you know, for--and horizontal drilling,
	all kinds of technologies that are more than paying off the,
	you know, the investment that the public has made in those
	technologies.
	Ms. Kim. Great. Anyone want to chime in too?
	Dr. Tierney. Yes, please. Representative Kim, I'm--I was
	raised near you, in Redlands, California, and went to school at
	the Claremont Colleges, so it's--I know your district well. And
	one of the things that complements what Professor Jenkins just
	said, with regard to the important role that the Federal
	Government plays in supporting basic science and applied
	science on storage, among other things, is the kinds of things
	that have been done in Southern California to have really a
	demand pull associated with storage technologies, and moving
	those into the markets. So those two things in conjunction with
	each other are really part of the innovation cycle that can
	pull resources into the market and lower costs over time. So I
	think there's a lot to learn from California's experience on
	this.
	Ms. Kim. Thank you. I would like to thank Dr. Jenkins and
	Dr. Tierney for your responses. Let me get onto the second
	question. How does transitioning to the smart grid, or adding
	Internet of Things capabilities to industry or control systems
	influence security and resiliency in the energy sector? How
	should we think about incorporating new technologies, like
	artificial intelligence, or the Internet of Things, in
	developing more efficient battery storage units?
	Dr. Tierney. We really need to set better standards for
	assuring grid security protocols related to cyber and other
	issues, because all of those Internet of Things could have the
	opportunity to create intrusions into the grid's performance.
	So there's regulatory in the form of standard-setting that are
	uniform around the country, but there's really a tremendous
	amount of R&D that would be subject to your Committee's
	jurisdiction associated with simulation tools that provide
	different angles on how there are the interactions between
	Internet of Things devices and local grid operations. There's a
	long list of things that I've included in my testimony that
	would address the kinds of things that you're talking about.
	Dr. Rai. If I might add, Ms. Kim, very quickly, there is a
	flip side to it. As we talked about, smart devices, smart
	devices, smart meters, could have really helped a lot in terms
	of very smartly cycling non-critical load, which actually was
	frozen, and so there were, you know, large parts of the
	population without power for several days, as well as in terms
	of predictive capability. You mentioned artificial
	intelligence. There is a lot of that could be brought to really
	get a look ahead. And the final point I want to make is, you
	know, we do want to separate this event from what can be
	managed through even grid scale storage. You know, this was an
	event that lasted for 3 days, and, you know, 7 days in many
	parts. That's, you know, there are very few types of single
	storage scaled, including, you know, very large--storage that
	can be brought, but, you know, you can't cite that everywhere,
	so there are other types of solutions. You know, the scale of
	this problem is, you know, a little bit on the higher side of
	the spectrum.
	Mr. Torres. And----
	Ms. Kim. Thank you.
	Mr. Torres. --Representative Kim, if I could add something
	really quickly, maybe to bridge between your two questions?
	It----
	Ms. Kim. Um-hum.
	Mr. Torres [continuing]. Really highlights the importance
	of government research and government involvement. The industry
	alone will not have the understanding of the evolving threat,
	and the national security implications of the work that they're
	doing. They also tend to focus on more near term research, and
	so, tying back to the universities, tying to the applied and
	basic research at the National Laboratories, with the national
	security in mind, I think is a key as we move forward. Thank
	you.
	Ms. Kim. Thank you. I know my time is up, so I want to
	thank all the witnesses for your thoughtful responses. Thank
	you. I yield back.
	Staff. Mrs. Fletcher is next.
	Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you, and thank you to Chairwoman
	Johnson and Ranking Member Lucas for holding this hearing
	today. It is incredibly important for those of us in Texas, and
	for the entire country, to understand what happened, and to
	craft legislation on this Committee to invest in and encourage
	research and development in grid technology, and reliable
	generation technology. I very much appreciate the witnesses
	sharing their expertise and time with us today, and in written
	testimony, which has been so helpful.
	As one of the Members of this Committee who lived through
	the Texas winter storm without power for several days, without
	water for several more, with a boil water notice for many days
	after that in my district in Houston, I want to underscore the
	seriousness of these cascading failures in both the physical
	market and the financial market. Today's hearing is important
	in making sure that we don't fail to respond in Congress. So
	many issues have been raised throughout this hearing, and there
	simply is not time for me to ask all the questions I have in
	these 5 minutes, so I will submit several questions to the
	witnesses for the record, and I look forward to your responses.
	Like Dr. Rai, I was--the temperatures in my own home were
	in the 40's, and I think even the 30's, during the event before
	I found my thermometer, but I was lucky. I had a fireplace, and
	I had warm clothes. Not very far from my house an 11-year-old
	boy, who had been overjoyed at seeing his first snow on Monday,
	froze to death in his own bed overnight. And he was not the
	only Texan who froze to death in this storm. Others died from
	carbon monoxide poisoning trying to keep warm. My constituents
	who are doctors told me they had never seen anything like the
	number of people they treated for carbon monoxide poisoning
	during this time.
	What we saw in Texas during the winter storm was a
	catastrophic failure of our electric grid, a catastrophic
	failure that didn't have to happen. There were ample warnings
	from both FERC and NERC about how the Texas grid was vulnerable
	to winter resilience issues that had been documented in detail
	after the 2011 winter storms. But years of inaction by our
	State legislature, our Governor, and his appointees at the
	Public Utility Commission left our State with a grid that
	focused on market profit at the expense of a resilient grid.
	While affordable energy should be a key priority of our grid
	system, Texans saw firsthand the catastrophe that occurs when a
	grid is unable to function and provide life-saving power when
	people need it the most.
	My colleague, Mr. Bera, recognizing that Texans have a
	well-known independent streak, mentioned that Texans perhaps
	choose to pay less than people in California for their energy.
	But in recent Wall Street Journal analysis has found that for
	two decades Texas customers have paid more for electricity than
	residents of States served by traditional utilities, $28
	billion more since 2004.
	Ms. Garza, given your years of experience at ERCOT, I'm
	interested in hearing your perspective on Texas's failure to
	plan for peak demand in the winter. And I won't be able to get
	to all of my questions, but I do want to focus on this because
	we haven't talked about it in this hearing. It's my
	understanding that when ERCOT planned for peak demand that
	would require distributors to shed load, it was done under the
	assumption that such an event would occur in the summer, when
	demand is typically highest. When ERCOT ordered distributors to
	shed load during the storm, the regional allocation for where
	loads had to be shed was geographically centered around areas
	where the summer demand would be the highest, particularly in
	Houston and in South Texas, despite the fact that the north in
	this case was experiencing higher demand. Is it your understand
	that this is the case?
	Ms. Garza. Yes, it is.
	Mrs. Fletcher. And do you agree with me that ERCOT should
	revisit this planning so that it's able to respond better to
	winter demand events?
	Ms. Garza. Yes, and I think that it's on the list of
	things to work on. The only thing I would caution you there is
	that, as you get further south in the State, you--there's more
	electric heat, and electric heat uses lots of electricity--the
	inefficient electric heat that generally exists the further
	south you go. And so--but factoring that in, and understanding
	a more seasonal distribution of load across the State to more
	fairly assign those curtailment responsibilities would be an
	appropriate step, and one that I think is underway.
	Mrs. Fletcher. Well, thank you, Ms. Garza. With my last
	few seconds I just want to mention, and ask this question, in
	your written testimony, and in your opening comments today, you
	mentioned that in setting standards we should have benefits
	that exceed costs, and noted the infrequency of cold weather in
	Texas is part of that analysis. With the deaths of at least 70
	Texans, the illnesses of many more, with tens of billions of
	dollars in damages to people's homes and businesses across the
	State, my question is whose costs are you referring to in your
	analysis? And, unfortunately, I'm out of time, so I'll take
	your response in--written response, but I really appreciate all
	of you being here today, and, Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Gonzalez is next.
	Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking
	Member Lucas, for holding this timely hearing today, and our
	distinguished witnesses for joining us. One thing I like about
	the Science Committee is we actually talk about facts, unlike
	the narratives that I see coming out on social media. In one
	case, when I flipped on my social media, which I'm one not to
	do, folks on the right saw it as the Texas blackouts, which
	were tragic, as justification for criticisms of wind turbines,
	and renewable energy generally. On the left, those opposed to
	federalism--free market ideas criticized Texas's deregulated
	energy market because some companies to prioritize cost over
	safety.
	Of course, the answer is both charges are true, partially.
	Power generation companies in Texas took a market risk and
	chose not to harden their facilities. I think we highlighted
	that today. And given the high variance of wind and solar,
	relying on renewables as a primary source of energy increases
	costs to consumers, can export jobs, and weakens energy
	independence. What we need is a system that works both ways.
	Renewable energy serves a purpose when it correctly supplements
	higher density energy sources. As cheaper, more effective
	technologies come online, they absolutely should be deployed.
	And, given the threat of uncontrollable weather events, Texas's
	power generators and utilities should be encouraged to
	winterize their facilities, and toughen the grid against
	extreme stress.
	We should also reconsider our approach to nuclear energy,
	which is a big priority of mine on this Committee, and across
	this Congress. While nat gas, coal, and renewable energy
	capacity plummeted during the blackouts, nuclear remained
	relatively reliable, operating at 74 percent of total capacity.
	I want to start with that fact specifically, and Dr. Jenkins.
	What is it about nuclear that allowed it to do better
	relatively? I know it too suffered, but relative to the other
	energy sources, is there something inherent to the technology,
	or is it coincidental? Just kind of walk me through what it is
	about nuclear that allowed it to be a little bit more resilient
	through the Texas cyclone.
	Dr. Jenkins. I mean, the main benefit that nuclear enjoys
	over natural gas in particular is it doesn't need fuel delivery
	during these kinds of events, and so it's one less
	vulnerability to supply disruptions on the fuel side of things.
	You know, the--these--because of the focus on safety and
	reliability in the nuclear power fleet as well, there are
	considerable efforts and investments made in maintaining the
	highest degree of reliability for those plants, and so they
	also tend to perform better during these sorts of extreme
	events as well because they are, you know, they're
	considerably, and justifiably, focused on maintaining the
	highest reliability.
	I think what the performance of the nuclear fleet also
	shows is that the diversity of resources helps decorrelate the
	failures, right? If you have 10 power plants that all have a 10
	percent chance of failure, but those aren't at all related to
	each other, the odds of them all failing at once are, like, 10
	to the negative ninth, you know, percent. It's, you know,
	infinitesimally small. But if they're all linked up to the same
	natural gas system, and that system goes down, or they're all
	in the same part of the transmission grid, and that
	transmission grid fails, then, their outages are correlated,
	and so I think we have to think carefully about how we
	diversity the risk exposure. And nuclear has its own risks,
	but, you know, there are different--they're different than
	those for other power sources, and that improves the resilience
	of our system through diversity.
	Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you. And, in your opinion, what do you
	think the appropriate role for nuclear is when it comes to
	generation, and our goals around reducing our carbon footprint?
	Dr. Jenkins. Well, I think there's two things to note. The
	first is that our existing nuclear power fleet is by far the
	cheapest source of clean firm generation capacity that we could
	have. Any new source of carbon-free firm generation is going to
	be more expensive, with rare exceptions, than maintaining our
	existing nuclear fleet as long as it is safe to operate. So
	that's the foundation upon which we can build toward a lower
	carbon and cleaner energy system. And then, in the future,
	newer nuclear power plants are one of several types of clean
	firm generation technologies. At the moment none are licensed
	for sale, right? We need to see----
	Mr. Gonzalez. Yeah.
	Dr. Jenkins [continuing]. The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory
	Commission) process through for the new scale reactors, for the
	GE-Hitachi BWR-X, for the others that are moving their way
	through the process, and when they come to market, we'll be
	able to see if they can compete with other clean firm
	generation technologies, like advanced geothermal, or Allam
	cycle power plants, or natural gas power plants with carbon
	capture, biomass gasification, hydrogen turbines. There's a
	whole range of options, and all of those are in a more nascent
	state today than other technologies, and so I think the race is
	on, and the efforts that this Committee has made in the Energy
	Act, and other legislation, to support the development of those
	technologies will help propel them forward.
	Mr. Gonzalez. So fair to say, in your estimation, nuclear
	should play an important role in our energy generation future
	in the United States?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. I think it already plays an important
	role today, and it can sustain that role into the future as
	well, especially if the new technologies can be affordably
	built, and on time, with little risk, which has been the
	challenge so far for the nuclear fleet.
	Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you. I hope everyone was listening. I
	yield back.
	Staff. Mr. Perlmutter is next.
	Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you very much to our Chairwoman and
	to the Ranking Member for this panel. You guys are great,
	it's--and you've got a lot of stamina to answer all these
	questions for this long. I've got a couple, one for the panel
	generally. And one of the reasons that I've lasted this long is
	that there's a Coloradan on the panel, and so I want to start
	with him.
	Mr. Torres, you know, you've talked about microgrids a
	lot. Explain to me, and to us, you know, how a microgrid, you
	know, has helped with the California wildfires, how it could
	help with the wildfires that we face in Colorado from time to
	time. Let's start with that question. And then I have a general
	question to the whole panel. You can think about it. We're
	going to do an infrastructure bill, a big one, that's going to
	be loads of bridges, and waterworks, and broadband, but there's
	going to be an emphasis on the electrical grid. If all of you
	could think of a couple things you'd like to see us do, either
	regionally or nationally, to upgrade the grid? So--but I'd like
	to start with you, Mr. Torres.
	Mr. Torres. Thank you, Representative Perlmutter. So first
	maybe understand--we should get on the same page about what I'm
	referring to as a microgrid. A microgrid is a smaller grid tied
	to the bigger grid that can disconnect and reconnect as needed.
	And why would you want to do that? And there are some really
	good examples with regards to even the recent wildfires in
	California. Borrego Springs is a microgrid demonstration. We've
	been working with them for quite a while. They have a lot of
	issues with transmission line, and the lack of reliability at
	times for them. So they needed ways to make sure that we
	could--they could keep the local power up and running. With
	some local sources, you can use a variety of generation
	sources. Renewable solar, different types of gen sets, energy
	storage, and so on.
	We're seeing the trend for those kinds of organizations
	that have a high necessity for very, very reliable power. For
	example, military installations have been working this space
	for a long time, and there was a big demonstration I was
	involved in about 10 years ago called the Spiders demonstration
	with--between the military and the Department of Energy. There
	are also other, you know, resources--or, I'm sorry, other loads
	that really need high reliability power. For example, data
	centers. They need to increase the amount of reliability
	because some of the computer systems are very, very sensitive
	to power.
	So I believe in the future we're going to see a lot more
	owners and operators of various loads that will want to make
	sure that, if there's a loss of a transmission line, or loss of
	centralized generation, that they can still operate through. So
	I foresee--microgrids would be an important element of the
	future evolving grid.
	Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you. So, Dr. Tierney, let's go to
	you, and----
	Dr. Tierney. Well, thank you, because----
	Mr. Perlmutter. Yes.
	Dr. Tierney [continuing]. I live in Colorado, so you have
	a second Coloradan on this panel.
	Mr. Perlmutter. Well, let's go to you, and if you want to
	talk about microgrids, or how you think, as a general
	principle, we can upgrade the system.
	Dr. Tierney. Yeah, OK.
	Mr. Perlmutter. Give me a couple examples.
	Dr. Tierney. Well, and I'm going to talk about it in the
	context of a clean infrastructure recovery package, if that's
	OK. So I----
	Mr. Perlmutter. Sure.
	Dr. Tierney [continuing]. Think there could be elements
	associated with infusing more dollars into building energy
	efficiency. So boring that sounds, but what a difference that
	would make if buildings were buttoned up so that houses that
	were facing either extreme cold or hot events were much more
	able to withstand those kinds of outside temperatures.
	Especially doing that in low income areas, and bundling those
	two things together, would be very important.
	Second, there is a green bank that is now included--I
	think it's in the Clean Futures Act. It's the accelerator,
	Clean Energy Accelerator. It would be a multi-multi-billion
	dollar infusion of support for local investments that deal both
	with lowering greenhouse gas emissions with various types of
	projects, as well as equity considerations. Another, third,
	issue is tree planting in urban areas, where there are real hot
	spots. And tree planting in Colorado would not be a bad idea as
	well, just to restock the forests. Transmission investment,
	we've already talked about, and then finally, in your
	jurisdictional authority area, all of these investments in R&D
	for grid resiliency at various stages in the process, and to
	harden the grid, and deal with cyber security, they're ripe for
	inclusion in this package. How's that?
	Mr. Perlmutter. Thank you very much, and I want to thank
	the entire panel. I can't get to all of you, but I want to
	especially thank the Coloradans.
	Staff. Mr. Baird is next.
	Mr. Baird. Thank you. Madam Chair, and Ranking Member
	Lucas, I really appreciate your cooperation in bringing this
	kind of timely Science Committee meetings, and then to have the
	talent and capabilities of our witnesses, is very much
	appreciated. I always learn something.
	We're interested in research, research and development,
	and it's a recurring trend, I think, in the industry, per se,
	across the country about the need for government, and academia,
	as well as private industry, to work together so that we can
	continue to be successful and be a leader around the world
	using American technology. So the National Labs, I've been
	impressed with those, and the things that they do, and I think
	it's important that we focus on the kinds of research that you
	think are necessary. So I'm going to start with Mr. Rai.
	Dr. Rai, what do you think is the difference between
	academia research and private industry research? Are there
	priorities? Can you help prioritize where you think we need to
	go focusing on that research?
	Dr. Rai. Thank you for that question, Mr. Baird. One of
	the key things that academic research is--that it is long
	range, and more basic--as we heard earlier in this hearing,
	that typically the private industry also does a lot of
	research, but that's really much harder--year to, you know, 5
	years, and rarely it is, you know, out--10 years out. But a lot
	of the question that you're talking about, not of the research
	that can be done, really is--benefit in the long run. We heard
	about many computing technologies, about hydraulic fracturing,
	about storage technologies, wind and solar, these took a long
	view, lot of investment over multiple decades, and then
	supported demand for policy as--and so, you know, there's
	really this sequencing--there's a lot of interaction, but still
	there's a sequencing in terms of both the nature of the
	problem, which are more fundamental, as well as the time
	horizon that the academic research really depreciates itself,
	but it has a very fundamental place, in terms of generating
	that diversity of powerful ideas that can then really play out
	in the--over time.
	Mr. Baird. Thank you. Would you agree with the idea that
	private industry can't really justify just basic research,
	whereas academia, we invest in that basic research, and we
	still get a return at some point down the road? It may not look
	like important research at the moment, but down the road
	private industry kind of picks that up. Is that--have I got an
	appropriate analysis of that situation or not?
	Dr. Rai. Absolutely, sir. It has played out again and
	again in very big ways--in very radical big ways that change
	the world forever in multiple sentences. So, yes, sir.
	Dr. Jenkins. Congressman, if I could just add to that, the
	partnership between universities and National Laboratories also
	extends beyond the basic research. There's applied research
	programs carried out in partnership with industry that continue
	to provide critical incremental innovations that move these
	technologies along and make American technological companies--
	technology companies, you know, maintain their competitive edge
	as well. So it extends into that translational and applied
	research realm also.
	Dr. Tierney. And especially because some of this grid
	resiliency R&D is really a public good, and no private company
	can really monetize its investment in R&D for such a broad-
	based thing. We really do need R&D in this area federally
	funded.
	Mr. Torres. Yeah, if I could add something as well, I
	think that partnership across academia, where they could focus
	on longer term research, basic research, higher risk, where
	industry cannot. They need to have a return, something that's a
	little bit more certain, with lower risk, and the laboratories
	kind of cover that spectrum. One of the roles that we have here
	at NREL is providing that bridge, taking, you know, the basic
	and applied research, and working with industry, going from,
	hey, can we prove this in a laboratory, but can this--to the
	next level, can we actually deploy it? How would it deploy, and
	can we minimize the risk before it gets deployed in full scale?
	Mr. Baird. Thank you. Ms. Garza, you got any comment?
	Ms. Garza. So my--no. Short answer is no.
	Dr. Jenkins. Could I just maybe add that I just strongly
	encourage the Committee to work with your colleagues to ensure
	appropriations that fulfill the kinds of authorizations
	included in the Energy Act? You've made enormous, you know,
	focus on the kinds of innovative priorities that we have, and
	we're talking about here, but unless the budget comes through,
	it's not going to be something that the labs, and universities,
	and private sector can tackle.
	Mr. Baird. Well, thank all of you for being here, and I
	see I'm out of time, so the Chair will probably cut me off
	right quick. Thank you.
	Staff. Ms. Ross is recognized next.
	Ms. Ross. Thank you so much, and thank you, Madam
	Chairwoman, for having this important hearing, and in such a
	timely way. I--I'm from North Carolina, and we are no stranger
	to odd weather, hurricanes. Today tornadoes are predicted in my
	district, and having a resilient energy grid, and a modern
	energy grid, is so, so important to not just delivering the
	energy every day, but dealing with these severe weather
	incidents.
	My first question is to Ms. Garza. In your testimony you
	speak about the need for better long-term forecasting of
	potential conditions. And, as I said, North Carolina's no
	stranger to severe weather, including severe winter weather. As
	a matter of fact, we--in our integrated resource planning,
	winter peaking has replaced summer peaking because of severe
	winter weather. I don't know if you knew that about North
	Carolina, but it was a surprise to a lot of people. We have
	tropical storms, hurricanes, flooding, and--so this can happen
	year-round. Could you please elaborate on how improved
	forecasting could help utility companies, State and local
	authorities, and consumers prepare for extreme weather events,
	like the one that happened in Texas, and happens frequently in
	North Carolina?
	Ms. Garza. Sure. You know, as I've mentioned, the, you
	know, the typical pattern has been to just look back at, well,
	how bad has the weather been, and let's assume that that's as
	bad as it's--it will be, and with additional population,
	additional uses, what will my demand for electricity be? And
	clearly that was insufficient here in Texas. One of the reasons
	for that look back would be for States like yours, in North
	Carolina, that are regulated, and they have to justify those
	expenses. It's easy to justify, well, I'm going to build for
	this, because we know it's happened. And unless there's
	additional input that says, well, the risk is larger than what
	you've actually occurred, I could see where it would be
	difficult for utilities that are reliant on rate-based
	recovery, or, you know, regulated rates of return, to justify
	additional expenditures. So that's another reason, another
	justification, for outside help, you know, input into the
	electric utility to make sure that they're adequately planning
	for the long term, whether it's heat, or cold, or storms, or
	whatever.
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, and Congressman, this is----
	Dr. Tierney [continuing]. I add to that, please? Because
	forecasting, and R&D in support of much finer forecasting, has
	this long-term component for demand, and it should take into
	consideration changes in the climate for sure. But there are
	short term operational forecasting issues where integration
	between wind forecasts and local effects, heat forecasts in
	certain areas, demand forecasts on a couple of days ahead.
	Those--and the forecast of outage probabilities of facilities
	under different kinds of climate events. Those kinds of
	things--that's a really important R&D--for resilience.
	Ms. Ross. Thank you----
	Dr. Jenkins. And as I----
	Ms. Ross [continuing]. Very, very much. Yes?
	Dr. Jenkins. Sorry----
	Ms. Ross. Somebody else want to jump in?
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt. As I emphasize in
	my testimony as well, I do think that additional climate
	science investment that focuses on this question of how these
	extreme weather events and threats are changing, you know, the
	probability distribution is moving, and it's those tail events
	that are the big threats to our system, and so those just get a
	little bit more likely. That has huge implications for how we
	plan and prepare our systems, and we need the forward-looking
	science to be able to help guide us as the climate changes over
	the next several decades.
	Ms. Ross. Thank you, Dr. Jenkins. My next question is for
	you. We--North Carolina's currently No. 2 in solar in the
	country, and--so we're interested in clean firm energy. I've
	represented solar companies, and actually connecting to the
	grid sometimes is the thing that keeps them from being able to
	realize their projects. You argue that we don't need every
	source of electricity to be reliable all the time, we just need
	the overall system to be reliable. In our last 23 seconds,
	could you just discuss further how we might be able to do that
	with an improved grid?
	Dr. Jenkins. Well, I think the critical need is for
	technologies that can replace, ultimately, our natural gas
	fleet, and our retiring coal, and eventually nuclear power
	plants that can provide a similar role as those power plants
	play today, but without the carbon dioxide emissions and air
	pollution associated with fossil generation today. So that
	could be advanced nuclear, natural gas plants with carbon
	capture and storage, advanced geothermal technologies. That
	could be potentially be very low cost, very long duration
	energy storage, although those typically are only a partial
	complement or substitute, and potentially hydrogen production,
	which could come from renewable sources, could come from
	biomass, and it could come from natural gas with carbon
	capture, all of which would provide a zero carbon fuel that
	could be used in converted natural gas power plants in the
	longer run.
	So all of those are options, and I think, again, as I
	mentioned earlier, the race is on between them to see which
	will be developed and scalable, and I think we need a diversity
	of those technologies because what works in North Carolina may
	not be what works in Texas, or in Minnesota, or in New England.
	And so we need a mix of resources that can play that role, the
	right, you know, role in each parts of the country.
	Ms. Ross. Thank you, Madam Chair, and I yield back.
	Staff. Ms. Bonamici is next.
	Ms. Bonamici. --Member Lucas, and thank you to our
	witnesses for joining us today. I regret I couldn't be in the
	entire hearing, but I care a lot about this very important
	topic. And we know that as we transition to a 100 percent clean
	energy economy our electric grid will be a central feature of a
	comprehensive climate strategy. Our grid needs to be clean,
	reliable, and, importantly, resilient to climate threats.
	According to a recent report from the University of
	California Berkeley an infrastructure build out needed to
	achieve a 90 percent carbon would support approximately 550,000
	jobs each year, and avoid at least $1.2 trillion in cumulative
	health and environmental challenges. Last--I joined my
	colleagues on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis in
	releasing a bold, comprehensive, science-based climate action
	plan reaching net zero emissions no later than mid-century, and
	net negative thereafter. Our plan includes many recommendations
	on grid resilience, including Congressman Bera's bill, which I
	know we're focusing on today.
	According to a report from the Government Accountability
	Office, GAO, released just last week, the climate crisis could
	affect every aspect of the grid, from generation, transmission,
	and distribution to demand for electricity, and cost billions
	of dollars annually. GAO specifically found that the Department
	of Energy does not have a strategy, goals, objectives, or
	performance measures to guide its efforts to enhance the
	resilience of the grid--climate crisis. And this is of
	particular concern to Oregonians in my State because of our
	raging wildfire season and other reasons as well.
	So, Dr. Tierney, how can the DOE best work with Federal
	science agencies to better understand, predict, and respond to
	grid threats from the climate----
	Dr. Tierney. There are dozens of things that the
	Department of Energy should be doing, and I think there is a
	groundswell of support for becoming more aggressive on
	resiliency issues. There was a wonderful program called the
	Grid Modernization Program that was authorized for 5 years, I
	think, Juan? Is that right? And continuing and depending that
	kind of work, supported--supporting work at the labs, will be
	extremely important on these issues.
	But also, as you say, standard setting for performance is
	badly needed. It's a tough area, when you think about those
	different levels of the system, generation, transmission,
	distribution, and demand, but hard work needs to be done there.
	Thank you for the question.
	Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. And following up on
	Representative Ross's question, Dr. Jenkins, I appreciated the
	reference in your testimony to not needing every source of
	electricity be--to be reliable all the time, and instead
	focusing on the system, that requires a mix of electricity
	resources, all playing the right role on the electricity team--
	isn't--important that we think about equitable access to--
	affordable clean energy so you can discuss the opportunities to
	make our transition to a 100 percent clean energy reliable and
	resistant grid equitable for vulnerable communities who have
	been on the front lines of the climate crisis?
	Dr. Jenkins. Well, I think that the--first I should add,
	Representative Bonamici, I was born and raised in your
	district, so it's a pleasure----
	Ms. Bonamici. I'm honored.
	Dr. Jenkins [continuing]. To talk with you. I think that
	there are huge benefits--potential benefits to a transition to
	a cleaner energy system for all communities, including those
	that are currently suffering the most from air pollution from
	our current fossil energy mix. You referenced a Berkeley Labs
	study on the 90 percent reductions in--or 90 percent clean by
	2035 power system. I'd refer you to the Net Zero America study
	that we worked out of Princeton as well, which estimates very
	similar benefits for--in terms of reduced air pollution,
	particularly from the phaseout of our coal fired power plants,
	which Oregon is scheduled to retire its last coal fired power
	plant later this--in a couple years, and this could result in--
	that, and electrification of vehicles, which are the major
	source of urban air pollution, could substantially reduce
	exposure to air pollution, and save significant lives and costs
	for households and communities.
	The other thing we have to think carefully about is where
	we want to direct investment in the new industries that are
	growing to deploy, you know, clean energy, and to manufacture
	the products there, and to ensure that those are distributed
	across our country in ways that communities in transition
	benefit from. And Oregon knows very keenly the challenges of a
	large-scale transition. I grew up in the aftermath of the
	timber wars, and the, you know, the impacts that the phase-out
	of the timber industry had across Oregon communities, and I
	think we need to make sure that we're proactively investing in
	economic development and diversification in communities that
	are currently relying on fossil generation or fossil fuel
	production as part of this.
	Ms. Bonamici. Thank you, Dr. Jenkins. I'm working on a
	national transition legislation, so we really do absolutely
	need to focus on those front-line communities. I also want to
	mention too, because you're an Oregonian, that we're doing some
	really exciting work on marine energy----
	Dr. Jenkins. Um-hum.
	Ms. Bonamici [continuing]. Off the coast because, unlike
	the sun and the wind, the waves are constant, so there's a
	tremendous amount of potential to capture the power of the
	waves, tides, currents. So----
	Dr. Jenkins. Yeah, as--along with floating offshore wind
	turbines, which could open up a huge--I mean, the West Coast
	has the windiest, you know, highest wind potential in the
	country, if we could cost-effectively tap into it.
	Ms. Bonamici. Well I'm, of course, working in
	collaboration with all our coastal partners. There's--
	tremendous amount of potential. Thank you very much, Madam
	Chair. I yield back.
	Staff. Chairwoman Johnson, all the Members present have
	been recognized already, so I think we're ready to close out
	the hearing.
	Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much to all of our
	tremendous witnesses. We are delighted that you had the time to
	spend with us, and I'll thank all of our Members for
	participating. Before we bring the hearing to a close, I would
	just simply like to say to our witnesses to stay close. We
	might have some questions that you might receive, and we
	really, really, really appreciate your input.
	The record will remain open for at least 2 weeks for
	additional statements from the Members, or to submit questions
	for our witnesses. And--so now I'll--whatever questions that
	our Committee Members might ask witnesses. Our witnesses now
	are excused, and our hearing is adjourned.
	[Whereupon, at 12:57 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]

	Appendix I

	----------

	Answers to Post-Hearing Questions


	Responses by Dr. Jesse Jenkins
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Responses by Dr. Sue Tierney
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]


	Appendix II

	----------


	Additional Material for the Record

	Executive summary of a report submitted by Representative Casten
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	[For full report see: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/
	2020-04/08-16-11-
	report.pdf]
	Documents submitted by Representative Posey
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Article submitted by Representative Posey
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	Report submitted by Representative Babin
	[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

	[all]
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