Advocate Summary

Issue:  Wind Energy Tax Credit
Advocate:  American Wind Energy Association – Jaime C. Steve 
Date of Interview: 7/23/02

[This interview was not taped]

Basic Background
How it works, and this is complicated, the tax guys are even confused by it, but when a company puts in for a project then they get the tax credit for ten years. Right now if they get it in and cleared by December 2003 they’ll have the tax credit for ten years, but if they don’t, as of right now, they’ve got nothing. And so my guys are going to be pretty mad if I don’t get this tax credit. And the thing is there are other things, bigger things, that could hold it up, like the President and Daschle not agreeing, and this provision is just a small thing, 170 million over five years isn’t actually a lot. I tell staffers, it sounds like a lot to you and me but within the tax bill which is in the trillions, it is nothing. But to these guys it is their livelihood, it is how they make their money, and it is top priority, and you don’t want to tell your members that this thing that is their whole livelihood is really insignificant. So it’s tricky.

How the grid works is a bit complicated, it had to be dumbed down for me, but how it was explained to me is that you have a glass of water you pour it into a pool, then you go to the other end of the pool and you scoop out a glass of water, you got what you wanted – a glass of water – but it’s not the same glass of water. So when a generator puts energy out on the grid, it just flows out to wherever it’s needed over the wires. So when somebody signs up for green energy – they have these green energy initiatives - people ask, well when are they going to come and change the power line to my house. That’s not how it works.  They are just getting a piece of paper, that they paid for green energy to be produced somewhere. So that’s why it’s better to have the windmills around, there’s something tangible there for people to see even if that’s not how it works. And these states in the Midwest have this immense potential for wind power production, but they don’t really need the energy, they’re already maxed out, we need to find a way to get the electricity from there to say Chicago. Different areas have their own grids and they are in a way self-contained. 

Prior Activity on the Issue 
Last time we also went for a fiver year extension but we only got two and half, so then this time we went for five again but only got two. That because there just wasn’t enough money. The administration was way up here and Congress was here, but the budget was way down here so something had to go. There are a lot of tax credits so they extend more of them for less time. It’s also political too, and this might be a cynical view of it, but if they made the tax credit permanent or indefinite, then we wouldn’t be coming back asking for it, working for it, that is going to fundraising dinners. Since lobbyists can’t take members out to dinner anymore, fundraising dinners are a good time to get some face time. We have a PAC, it’s small but it gets your names on the lists. When I get a fax or a call from a member of congress I don’t know I know it’s somebody soliciting money, and I’m like tell them I’m not here. PACs are about access and we get some face time with members I think because of it. Meetings are important and with staff, you have to be aware of their schedules and you have to make your message brief and to the point. Sometimes we’ll call them up and say just meet us in the hallway for ten minutes and then we’ll talk to them for twenty. But we’ll have a clear message. They don’t want a huge report, give them an inch thick report and they’ll flip through it at a meeting and then it’ll either go in the trash or in a file somewhere. I tell people I haven’t written anything longer than a page in five years and it’s true, except for like the testimony I have to write tonight, that will probably be two and a half. The Senate has more senior people and so they’re more specialized but in the House the energy person might have been the energy person since like ten minutes ago so you have to make it understandable, you can’t use these wonky terms and expect people to know what you are talking about. 

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
We started by trying to get a broad support base of members of congress. We brought some of our members in and then they met with their members of congress and we set all that up. We don’t talk much in those meetings, you can here from a Washington lobbyist any day of the week, but these are the real people that are being affected. We have an annual conference on wind energy, this year we had it in Portland, and we had 2000 people, I was pretty surprised, last year we had 1000, so this really is a growing industry. And at the annual meeting we have a legislative meeting of the legislative committee, which is also growing, and then we also meet two other times a year. I’ve got to say the wind guys have been good to me, we always go to these great places, and they all seem to like skiing so they always want to go to these great ski resorts. We also did a staff group trip. I’ve heard horror stories form staffers about these, like some organization took a group to Paris but they were stuck in a hotel the entire time, they might as well have been in Detroit, they didn’t see anything, and they just drilled them with information.  I got a group of about eight staffers together that I thought would be a good group, interesting fun people, I told them there was nobody in the group that you like wouldn’t want to get stuck next to on a bus. And we took them up to Vermont, in August, where it would be cool compared to here in August, and so we got up there to this nice ski resort and we were sitting at the bar having a beer looking out over the windmills and I was like okay, this was a success. The next day we just went out a visited the windmills and talked a bit and then their afternoon was free we went down hill mountain biking, one of the guys it turns out wasn’t as experienced as he let on and wound up breaking his collar bone. So now I’m known as the guy that broke Kyle’s collar bone and they joke up there if you don’t agree with the wind guy he’ll break your bones. But it was really successful in all, they came away with a good experience and got to see the windmills, Kyle just couldn’t drive his stick-shift or type for a while. 
	We also did a press conference, a conference call press conference. Daschle’s office called us up and was like can you do a press conference with us at 11 on Monday, and we were like sure. So he introduced us and we did it, and he said it was good for the Dakotas, and that it was about economic stimulus and that is was good for farms, and would help rural communities. And we were like great, what he said was great. And then we had a meeting up there and had both Senators and the Governor and about 600 people there, and that’s great when you can go back home that’s when you can get some time with them. And there were all these farmers there, listening about wind energy, and you know it was the middle of the winter and freezing and there’s not much else to do up there, but they came out because they could really benefit from this.  
	Some of our member companies lobbied on their own, like Florida Power and Light, they are a huge company and they have a utility in Florida and they do wind, so they have lobbyists up here for the whole corporation and they did some stuff on this on their own. I try to keep tables on what the individual member companies and what they are doing, you don’t know how much information they share with you though so it can be hard. You don’t want to go in someone’s office and they say, oh whoever was just here and they said something different. Your credibility is the most important thing in this town, if you say something and then they find out its not true, or not the whole story, then they’re going to be like, why trust the wind guy. And then you’re done. I know people in this town that lost their credibility, you just retire. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
It’s unclear what will happen, right now we’re saying energy bill, energy bill, but you have to be flexible, you have an end point that you want to get to but what I’m saying now I might not be saying next week, you might have to take a crooked path to get there. The energy bill almost tanked on the Senate floor, and now that it’s in conference stage they are trying to reconcile a thirteen hundred page Senate bill with a four hundred page House bill and there’s only about two hundred non-controversial pages. That’s where we are and that’s where you want to be – to be uncontestable, that is we are pretty much the same in both bills, so there is nothing to negotiate about the provision so it goes through. The politics might get in the way though, I’m a Democrat, and I’d like to see the Democrats regain the House, but if they start thinking they are going to be able to, they might get confident and say let’s kill this bill and we’ll do our own energy bill next year. And then we’ll have to find another way to go.  

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
Ed Markey was a big supporter, he’s a great guy, very nice very funny. Grassley (R-IA) was the sponsor in the Senate in the beginning he was the chair but after the switch in Congress now he is ranking. A lot of people weren’t too happy with him (Jeffords) for that; you had these people that worked years to become chair and then they didn’t get to have their full term. Foley, Matsue, Weller and Thurman were the co-sponsors in the House. 

Targets of Direct Lobbying
You want to start out in the middle so you can get as broad and bipartisan of a coalition as possible. Like we knew we’d have Markey, but we didn’t start with him, if you take a list of left leaning Democrats in to a conservative member they’re not going to sign on, they’ll be like “him, he’s on it, I’m not signing on it.” So we started out in the middle with two Democrats and two Republicans they you expand out from there. We have this list [see folder] and we break it down by state too, so a member can go to their state and say oh, he’s on ok I’ll sign on too then, or they can go to the alphabetical list and say oh, he’s moderate, I usually agree with his views, or really it’s the staffers looking at the list and saying yeah my boss has similar views to this member, I’ll pass it along to my boss to sign on to. 

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
We are a member of the Sustainable Energy Coalition, which is a standing coalition, it includes a broad range of groups from the Sierra Club to real left wing groups and then some conservative groups. We have monthly meetings and see what we are going to work on together and then sometimes you’ll have an issue and you’ll call some of them up and ask if they’ll come along and sometimes they will and sometimes they’ll say no sorry we can’t help you on that one. The environmental groups were supportive on wind energy, like the Union of Concerned Scientists they signed on a letter. That’s good when you can get disparate parties signing on to a letter, a member of congress sees a letter and it’s signed by the Chamber of Congress and the Sierra Club, how often do you see that.  

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
[I don’t think biomass was involved in the wind energy provision, more the other provisions that AWEA was interested in in the Energy bill]
We worked a lot with the biomass people, they want to change the law from including just closed loop processing to open loop as well. I hate even using those terms, they are so wonky, talk in this town is so different from the rest of the country, it’s a weird world but then this is where things get done. By friends back home ask me what I do and I say I go to lunch, and I try to explain it, and then they’re like now explain it so that the kids can understand. But anyway, closed loop is about using renewable biomass, like corn but they want to expand that to not-really-renewable stuff as well, like the wood crates used to haul cargo. And then the enviros are against incinerating and so that will be a disagreement. But it is the American Bio-Energy Association. There is also a Renewable Energy Caucus, we have Schaffer (R-CO) leading that in the House and there are a lot of members now, and we keep them informed and there is a Caucus in the Senate now too. Some of them have never even voted with us but we keep them up to speed, you now and then you can go in there and say, “you know you are a member of the Renewable Energy Caucus and you haven’t voted with us once” and then they are like oh maybe I should vote your way on this. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
We don’t even argue the environmental angle anymore. I walk in there and they see green. Oh it’s the wind guys, we’re green. We argue the economic development angle and that its good for the small farmer and that it could help save the family farm. If a farmer can make 200 dollars per acre from harvesting and a windmill only takes a little bit of land, a quarter acre and they are going to get paid 3000 dollars per quarter acre then they are like okay sign me up. 
I try to always be positive I don’t attack the other types of energy I just say why wind is good. Some of the enviros and even some of our member companies come from an earlier time long hair hippies, and they want to bash coal and nuclear. If I go into the Senator from West Virginia and he’s looking at the materials and he sees coal is bad, and he represents the coal miners he’s gong to be like “what are you doing to me? I would have supported this wind thing but now…” so I always stay positive. 

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
And then there’s also a little bit of the security angle, that we want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but that’s not as big because not that much of our electricity is generated by burning oil. 

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
Sure if I go talk to Markey I’m going to tell him about the environmental advantages of wind and if I go talk to someone in the Midwest I’m going to concentrate on how this will be good for the farmers in their district. O’Neil’s saying that “All politics is local” – that’s totally true. 

Nature of the Opposition
There was no opposition on this. There are people that just don’t like tax credits generally, but they didn’t go after this. You pick your battles and they went after renewable portfolios instead. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
Not applicable.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
Not applicable.

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
Not applicable.

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
House Ways and Means
Senate Finance
House Energy and Commerce
Senate Energy and Natural Resources

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
The Energy bill is currently in conference as of July 2002. 

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
Working to get the tax credit for wind energy extended for five years. 

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I went to Cornell, I took classes in political science and communications/ journalism and the environment this was before their was a major in environmental affairs or anything. And I knew I wanted to come to Washington, I came down here and got an internship with a group that put out a newsletter on the environment for policy makers, so that was great it was all three things I liked. Then I went to law school, I worked in the New York metropolitan area for a while and then came back down here and worked for that same group again, this time paid though. And then a space opened up at the Union of Concerned Scientists and I was there for a while, and that was great but it’s a little weird too, my ex-wife used to call them the Union of Perturbed Scientists which is funny but true. And then I went to work with the wind guys a couple of years ago. 

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We do most everything in-house, once and a while we’ll use an outside consultant. But we don’t really do much research, like on this – there wasn’t any research needed just go in there with a good argument and we have a good argument. 

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Two

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
The office is just me and one other lobbyist, he has a technical background and so does more of the technical stuff, like he goes to FERC, I never go to FERC it’s all wonky stuff over there. 

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Companies

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous
He spoke about some work on the Farm bill, allowing farms to have windmills on their fallow ground – which is set aside for conservation near streams. And another issue he was testifying the next day on concerned off-shore wind energy; there is a proposal to put windmills off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island.