S&P Global explored Biden’s first 100 days, quoting Leah Rubin Shen on why federal infrastructure investments should include grid enhancements. Read snippets below and iterations of the full article here and here.

Washington — While US President Joe Biden's first 100 days in office brought a flurry of executive actions, many pieces of his climate agenda, including key parts of his 10-year, $2 trillion infrastructure-focused American Jobs Plan, will require approval from Congress, where partisan divides and parliamentary procedures could determine the fate of those proposals.

In the early weeks of Biden's presidency, Congress was consumed with passing additional coronavirus relief legislation. The president signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending package into law in March that increased funding for low-income households to pay their utility bills but was otherwise mostly absent of major energy and climate provisions.

But the American Jobs Plan, with its focus on "building back better" from the pandemic, offers Congress a chance to support Biden's goal of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035 and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by 2050…

What industry wants

Power industry groups hope Congress can reach a consensus on infrastructure, particularly if that package includes Biden's proposed grid enhancements...

But industry members acknowledged the uphill battle inherent in reconciling the administration's $2 trillion proposal with the GOP's smaller infrastructure plan.

"I think taking the grid out of the equation is really a mistake, given what we've seen just in the past six to nine months in California and then in Texas," said Leah Rubin Shen, who coordinates federal policy efforts for the business group Advanced Energy Economy.

To drum up conservative support, AEE stressed that investment in advanced energy technologies generally produces at least 4-to-1 returns on that investment and has tremendous effects on job creation and economic development.

Read the full article here.