Bingaman to meet with Obama Wednesday on 'clean energy standard'

By Andrew Restuccia - 02/01/11 05:35 PM ET

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) will meet with President Obama at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss a proposal to significantly expand U.S. low-carbon power generation.

Obama, in his State of the Union address last week, called on lawmakers to pass legislation requiring that 80 percent of the country’s electricity come from low-carbon sources such as wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas and coal with carbon-capture technology. Obama has not yet offered specific detail on how his “clean energy standard” would be structured.

The White House has reached out to Bingaman to help flesh out the details of the proposal. Bingaman, for his part, has been a strong proponent of a renewable electricity standard, which focuses on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar without including low-carbon sources like nuclear and natural gas.

Obama and Bingaman will meet Wednesday afternoon to discuss energy policy broadly. But Bingaman spokesman Bill Wicker said much of the conversation will focus on the clean energy standard.

Wicker said the meeting will give the senator an opportunity to learn more about the proposal. “The chairman is eager to help, but he also has a lot of questions,” Wicker said.

In a speech Monday, Bingaman said he would work closely with the White House on the proposal. But he also pointed to a number of “key design issues” that need to be resolved, including what energy source counts as clean and how the proposal accounts for existing clean energy generation.

“I think it’s going to take some work to see how to design it so that it can accomplish what the president intends in his statements about the subject,” Bingaman told The Hill on Tuesday. “I’m anxious to work with Democrats and Republicans on the committee and otherwise in the Senate to see if we can do that.”

Republicans have so far responded coolly to the proposal, raising concerns that the standard may unfairly preference renewable energy.