Vice President Biden began selling the Obama administration’s energy infrastructure investment plan on Tuesday, pitching it as a pro-business, pro-middle-class economic driver at a utility provider in Philadelphia.
The White House released a report earlier Tuesday calling for billions of dollars in new spending, looking to push federal money toward energy storage and transmission projects like replacement pipelines or electricity grid modernization.
Biden said the funds would both help overhaul the country’s energy infrastructure — the plan’s stated goal — but also provide jobs and attract new business from around the world. Projections show the need for millions of new workers in the energy transmission and storage sector, he said, and thousands more petroleum engineers, plumbers, pipe fitters and repairmen to keep up with growing U.S. energy production.
{mosads}“These are the jobs that used to exist at the turn of the 20th century, in the steel industry, in the auto industry,” Biden said, speaking at the utility Peco Energy Co. “These are good jobs, and I promise you, Americans are hungry for them. They’re not afraid to work, if we connect them to the opportunities.”
Investment in the energy sector and improved infrastructure could attract businesses from overseas looking to take advantage of the energy boom, he said.
“Investing in our infrastructure creates a virtuous cycle creating good paying jobs, attracting companies to America and expanding the ones who are here,” Biden said.
The administration says there are aspects of its plan, the first Quadrennial Energy Review, that it can implement on its own. But it will need congressional approval for some of it, including billions of dollars that officials say will go toward beefing up local government and private sector investment in energy projects.
Some of the plan’s proposals are built into Obama’s 2016 budget request, but many others are separate.
Leading congressional Republicans greeted the plan with something like cautious optimism on Tuesday.
“We need a modern and resilient energy infrastructure that will meet tomorrow’s energy challenges,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), the head of the panel’s Energy and Power subpanel, said in a statement. “We are reviewing the administration’s full recommendations, but we have already found areas of common ground where we will work together.”
Broadly, the plan is meant to modernize U.S. energy infrastructure in the face of aging transmission and storage systems, increasing renewable energy production, more energy exports, climate change and other factors.
“The U.S. is in the midst of an energy transformation that will allow us to remain the energy epicenter of the world in the 21st century,” Biden said. “To maintain that position, we need a 21st century energy infrastructure.”