Nevada’s leaders should support its continued innovation in clean energy

By Harry Reid

Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Nevada’s history was written in small towns like Virginia City, Smith Valley and Ely. In these small towns, Nevadans banded together to mine and ranch in hopes of building better lives for their families.

The next chapter in Nevada’s history will be focused on clean energy. Today, we will add yet another success story to that chapter when we celebrate the completion of Tonopah’s Crescent Dunes solar energy project.

Tonopah’s clean energy project is unlike anything ever built in the United States. Unlike traditional solar energy projects that only generate electricity during the day, this project will power Nevada’s economy day and night.

This technological marvel will bring hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to Nye County and Nevada. It will benefit the Silver State for decades, as engineers and experts from around the world come to see what is possible when the public and private sectors partner together to build the next generation of clean-energy technology.

As Nevadans know firsthand, clean energy has a tremendous impact on job creation and economic development. Just last month the state announced Nevada had regained all of the 186,000 jobs that were lost during the Great Recession. Our state’s embrace of clean energy clearly helped our economy recover.

We were able to claw back from one of the worst economic crises in modern history by, in part, investing more than $6 billion and establishing Nevada as a national clean-energy leader. We took advantage of our state’s vast renewable resources, created invaluable private-public partnerships and boosted our economy significantly. Thousands of people are working in Nevada today because of our state’s commitment to clean energy.

The success of clean energy in Nevada is clear, but we’ve had to fight to get here. And we’ll need to keep fighting to build on this progress.

Fossil fuel interests, led by the billionaire Koch brothers, have waged an all-out war against policies supporting clean energy, and their lackeys in Congress have consistently done their bidding. Sadly, the list of Koch-supported puppets include some of Nevada’s Republican representatives in Congress, such as Rep. Joe Heck. Unsurprisingly, Heck has been an outspoken opponent of clean-energy policies.

When it came to the 2009 stimulus bill — which included a $737 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy for Tonopah’s clean energy project — Heck was adamantly opposed. It didn’t matter that the DOE funding was important to Nevada’s clean-energy boom and supported projects like Tonopah’s Crescent Dunes.

Speaking about the stimulus, Heck said things like, “That doesn’t sound like success to me,” and, “There is no such thing as a jobs bill.”

He should try telling that to the people of Nye County. Or the thousands around the state who have good-paying jobs today because of Nevada’s role as a national clean-energy leader.

Under the influence of the Koch brothers, Republicans feel pressure to terminate incentives designed to put clean energy on an even playing field with permanently subsidized fossil fuels. Some of the Republicans in Nevada’s congressional delegation, especially Heck, have been standing in the way of clean energy every step of the way.

Whenever there was a chance to support clean energy incentives, Heck toed the Koch brothers’ line. When faced with a pivotal vote on a loan guarantee program that would help Nevada’s clean-energy industry, Heck voted to eliminate the program.

I helped extend vital clean-energy tax incentives and defeat Republican attempts to eliminate the loan program. As a result, billions of dollars of private investments and thousands of jobs were created in Nevada. But Heck and his fossil fuel friends continue their assault on these programs, while protecting the permanent subsidies enjoyed by polluting, outdated and inefficient energy sources.

Nevada’s leaders must do everything they can to ensure our state is in the best position possible to compete for a share of the $40 billion available each year by America’s clean-energy economy. The Silver State is well-positioned to become a central hub for clean-energy growth, but it won’t happen unless we’re all in.

Crescent Dunes in Tonopah was not approved, financed and built overnight. It took years of work, collaboration between the federal government and the project’s developer, and a strong commitment from me and other lawmakers who were willing to fight for Nevada’s clean energy future.

As we write the next chapter in Nevada’s history, we should stand up to the outside interests such as the Koch brothers, who are determined to keep that future out of our own hands. And we should not tolerate any leader who puts those outside interests above our own.

We’ve already laid a successful foundation for a clean-energy economy in Nevada. The next chapter of Nevada’s history will be about harnessing and expanding the clean-energy economy for generations to come.

Harry Reid, Nevada’s senior U.S. senator and the Democrat leader, is retiring after 30 years in the Senate.