The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee this week will hear how foreign governments entice clean energy companies to set up overseas with carefully tailored packages of tax breaks and other incentives.
Thursday's hearing on global investment trends in clean energy technologies will bring a panel of venture capitalists and others close to the highly sought startups that the administration and lawmakers alike frequently describe as the engines of economic growth.
Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is a strong proponent of federal assistance to help young energy companies cross over the so-called financing "valley of death" that makes it difficult for promising ideas to find the funding they need to get off the ground.
He has said reforming the Energy Department's loan guarantee program and addressing clean tech financing are among his priorities for "early attention in this Congress."
Committee aide Michael Carr said the hearing would be geared to establishing how global competitors address those issues.
"The objective here is to get that record established: What are the investment flows, what's been happening lately in the investment environment in clean tech, both here and overseas, and what are some of the considerations that a company takes into account when they decide" where to set up facilities, Carr said.
Carr said that while the hearing is not specifically tied to a particular bill, debate will likely return to the Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA), or "green bank," that Bingaman proposed in the last Congress and which was included in that session's House-passed climate bill (ClimateWire, July 1, 2010).
"CEDA is our big attempt to try to deal with that issue in the U.S., so I would expect most folks to try to talk about that in some fashion," Carr said.
Given the strong bipartisan support that the proposal attracted in the previous Congress, Carr said he was unsure of the extent to which it would face opposition in the new committee.
He said in the last session once the workings of the proposed agency were fleshed out, "for the most part, people were pretty much won over." But with five new Republican members and three new Democrats on the panel, that support-building will have to start anew.
A staffer for ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the session would likely frame the views of senators who favor extensive government intervention against those who see federal involvement as tying up projects and permitting, especially in energy development. Murkowski generally "leans more" to the latter view, the staffer said.
Schedule: The hearing is Thursday, March 17, at 9:30 a.m. in 366 Dirksen.
Witnesses: Ethan Zindler, head of policy analysis, Bloomberg New Energy Finance; Will Coleman, partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures; Neil Auerbach, managing partner, Hudson Clean Energy Partners (invited); and Kelly Sims Gallagher, associate professor of energy and environmental policy, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (invited).
