Jeff Bingaman: “I offered an amendment last week to require that 15 percent of the electricity sold in the Nation come from renewable…”

“I offered an amendment last week to require that 15 percent of the electricity sold in the Nation come from renewable energy resources by the year 2020. We have not been able to get an agreement to have a vote on this amendment, or on other forms of it that might have provided more flexibility to States in meeting the goals of the amendment. We would have been agreeable to accepting a supermajority threshold for passage of the amendment. We still could not reach agreement. That implies, to me, that opponents of the measure believe that 60 or more Senators support the amendment. I believe that they may be correct in assuming so. This amendment would have been as significant an amendment as we could have added to the bill. Such a standard would increase the generation of renewables in the Nation from something over 2 percent to a much greater share of our generation supply. This provision would result in cleaner electricity generation, be the source of extensive creation of new jobs, enhance our energy security, lower the price of natural gas, and could even result in lower electricity prices.”