The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee this week passed two bills from Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin including one to create a grant program for rural electric cooperatives to develop renewable energy storage projects.
The committee on a voice vote passed H.R. 4447 which is the Expanding Access to Sustainable Energy or EASE Act of 2019 sponsored by Rep. Mullin (OK-02). The act would establish a Department of Energy grant program for rural electric co-ops to identify, evaluate, and design energy storage and microgrid projects.
“Renewable energy is an important part of the all-of-the-above energy strategy our country needs and being able to store the renewable energy produced will help us to utilize more of it,” Mullin said.
He said rural areas like those in his eastern Oklahoma congressional district need to be able to keep up with technology and have the necessary resources to invest in renewable energy storage.
“This public-private partnership would allow rural electric co-ops to deploy energy storage projects to increase energy efficiency and provide cost savings to consumers. I am glad to see this legislation pass the full committee with bipartisan support and I look forward to supporting it on the House floor.”
The other measure that also received voice-vote approval was H.R. 7948, the Tribal Health Data Improvement Act.
It would reaffirm that Tribal public health authorities are entitled to access public health data. Mullin submitted an amendment in the nature of a substitute to the underlying legislation, which made technical changes to the bill.
“Our sovereign Tribal Nations and Tribal Epidemiology Centers were always supposed to have equal access to public health data that states, counties, and cities have. But for years many Tribes have faced numerous challenges while trying to access this public health data,” Mullin said.
Full video of the markup can be found here.
Source: Rep. Mullins release
