NJBIA joined the National Association of Manufacturers and 40 other business groups this week in urging President Joe Biden to expedite the $2.5 billion electrical grid modernization and other reliability improvements authorized under the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act.
“Manufacturers are counting on your leadership to ensure we have affordable, reliable electricity so our industry can remain competitive,” the June 29 letter stated.
Funds for modernizing the nation’s electrical grid are part of the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act that the president signed into law on Nov. 21, 2021.
“Your administration’s experts and available data have made it clear that our nation’s electric grid is increasingly vulnerable, with heat waves, hurricanes, wildfires and Russia’s continued war in Ukraine keeping energy markets tight in the summer months,” the business groups wrote. “Manufacturers rely on electric stability, meaning power failures would exacerbate the supply chain disruptions and inflation that American families are already enduring.”
The business groups asked that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) “streamline permitting processes for all energy sources as well as critical minerals, materials and chemicals” to strengthen domestic fuel supplies and supply chains that support electricity production, transmission, and delivery.
The business groups also requested that the Biden administration and the nation’s governors work with manufacturers and electric utilities to support all available electric generation-ready options, noting that “renewable energy sources alone are incapable of meeting the demand created by increasing electrification.”
DOE and North American Electric Reliability Corporation experts have predicted that existing fossil and nuclear generation, which produces more than two-thirds of our nation’s electricity, will be critical to power generation for decades to come, the letter noted.
Go here to read the entire letter.
