Martin Heinrich: “I want to start with a story from my home State of New Mexico. Right now, across my State and Arizona, hundreds of…”

“I want to start with a story from my home State of New Mexico. Right now, across my State and Arizona, hundreds of workers are putting the finishing touches on a 3.5-gigawatt wind farm and a 550-mile transmission line. For context, 3.5 gigawatts is roughly the equivalent of 3 rac{1}{2} uclear reactors. This project is literally the largest clean energy project in North American history, bigger than the Hoover Dam. That is pretty unbelievable. But what is even more unbelievable is that the permitting process for that transmission line and that generation started over 17 years ago, and the project is being energized, as we speak. Think about that. It took nearly two decades to get the permits needed to build the project. That is 17 years of redtape. That is 17 years without the jobs this could create; 17 years of lost income, lost local spending, lost tax revenue; 17 years without the energy our Nation needs to grow; and 17 years without the roughly $20 billion of economic impact on the southwestern part of our country that we are finally seeing--because the reality is that electricity is what powers our communities, our innovation, our economies, and our lives. And electricity has powered this country since the 1880s. But, right now, we are facing an energy crisis of the Trump administration's own making.”