The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) commends the administration for releasing the first Quadrennial Energy Review (QER), focusing the nation’s attention on improving America’s energy infrastructure. The administration’s analysis of infrastructure needs for transmission, storage, and distribution is especially timely as the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee undertake a crucial review of national energy infrastructure and development of broad-based energy legislation.
NEMA thanks the Department of Energy and other administration contributors to the QER for including in the report NEMA’s recommendation for the strategic siting of spare transformers to enable rapid response to electrical outages.
As Congress and the administration move forward with energy legislation, policymakers are also urged to consider:
- Five-year accelerated depreciation to incentivize investment in smart grid technologies that use information and communications to isolate and contain outages, and repair them remotely.
- Incentivizing the construction of highly resilient microgrids—localized electrical generation coupled with energy storage systems that have the ability to isolate from the main grid and operate independently—either on conventional or renewable energy sources.
- Allowing federal disaster aid to be used for smart rebuilding (replacing damaged grid equipment with resilient technologies and installing backup power).
- Permitting federal regulators to facilitate new interstate transmission lines with “backstop” authority to act when states are at an impasse.
- Securing America’s electric grid from cyber and physical attacks through public-private cooperation, federal funding of R&D, promoting information sharing through liability protections, and deployment of advanced sensing equipment.
View NEMA’s complete list of QER recommendations for more information.
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