Members of this Committee,
I have been given 40 billion dollars to use as my basis, which is 11.1 billion dollars greater than what the real-life Department of Energy has requested for fiscal year 2016. I will be getting most of my information from their budget proposal summary here.
I will keep this rather simple and make my testimony in the format that the Chairperson asked me to follow.
I would like funding priorities to be directed to the Science and Energy offices within the Department of Energy. To expand for each individual office, we should maintain or increase funding for the following:
The budget of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy should be increased so that the Department of Energy can expand its ability to help direct the nation towards a more sustainable future by consulting with private and public entities to reduce their negative effects on the environment and to transition to and help develop technologies for the expanded adoption of renewable energy sources across all sectors of the country.
The budget of the Office of Nuclear Energy should be increased to further sustain ongoing research and development regarding advanced reactor and fuel cell technologies, as well as to initiate research and development regarding waste management in transportation, storage, and disposal.
The budget of the Office of Fossil Energy should be maintained so that the Department of Energy can keep to its obligations regarding the research and development of carbon capture and storage and natural gas technologies and the maintenance of the systems we have in place.
The budget of the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability should be increased to support grid modernization efforts and to fund critical emergency response and electric grid security capabilities.
The budget of the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs should be maintained so that the Department of Energy can maintain its obligations in its partnership with the Department of the Interior to support and address the need for clean and sustainable energy systems on Native American lands.
The budget of the Office of Science should be increased to further expand its status as the largest federal sponsor of research in the physical sciences. The Department of Energy has the responsibility of helping advance research and development of basic energy sciences to provide for new energy technologies and the mitigation of the environmental impacts of energy use. Research that takes part with the funding of the Department of Energy includes biological and environmental science, nuclear physics, high energy physics, mathematics and computation science, and fusion energy science. All of these fields help not only the goals of the Department of Energy, but are beneficial for human society as a whole.
The Nuclear Security offices of the Department of Energy should at the most be maintained and funding should be focused primarily on the peaceful activities of these offices. The Department of Energy is responsible for expanding the military use of nuclear energy and the maintenance and improvement of the safety, reliability, performance of the nuclear weapons stockpile of the United States, nonproliferation and counterproliferation measures and radiological emergency response in the United States. I will not request any budget increases for this department.
Thank you.