Greentech Media

Greentech advocates said Friday morning they were disappointed after an energy bill passed by the U.S. House on Thursday afternoon failed to get the votes needed to call for a vote in the Senate.

The 53-to-42 vote fell seven votes short of the 60 required to end debate.

That puts the House back in the position of having to seek a compromise to gain more votes, if it hopes to pass an energy bill.

The House previously passed a similar bill, while the Senate passed a bill that excluded such elements as stricter fuel-economy standards for vehicles, tax credits for renewables and a national renewable portfolio standard.

An informal congressional committee had been working to reconcile the two bills, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., last week announced they had come to an agreement to support a corporate average fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

But the tax credits, which would add about $21.5 billion in tax incentives for renewables over the next decade -- paid, in part, by a repeal of $13 billion in tax subsidies for oil and gas producers -- and the renewable portfolio standard, which would require utilities to get 15 percent of their energy from renewable sources, could be back on the cutting block in an attempt to pass the bill.

Environmentalists were unhappy about the news and said they hoped those elements would be included in the final bill.

"We are deeply disappointed by this morning's Senate vote on energy legislation," said Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association. "Our nation is at a critically important crossroads on energy policy and, with this morning's vote, the Senate seems prepared to take the wrong road. … We call on Senate leaders to work together to ensure that overwhelmingly popular provisions to promote renewable electricity are not left out in the cold."

Even Santa Claus is getting involved. In an event sponsored by Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future, Santa Claus and a group of green-energy advocates handed out compact fluorescent light bulbs and urged citizens to contact their legislators in support of the energy bill (see a press release and the group's podcast).

Still, the blocked vote is hardly a surprise. The Senate already had opposed some provisions, such as the renewable tax credits and the portfolio standard, of the House bill the first time it reached the Senate floor (see Renewable Tax Credit and Portfolio Standard Could Get Cut from Energy Bill).

And even if Democrats do manage to get the bill passed nearly intact through the Senate, it faces the possibility of a presidential veto. The White House has warned that it opposes a bill that raises taxes or includes a renewable portfolio standard (see Will Greentech Get Anything From the Energy Bill?).

Ethan Zindler, head of North American research at research firm New Energy Finance, said the vote means it's "back to the drawing board."

"The Democrats in the House were shooting for the moon with this version of the legislation and they didn't get there," he said. "They are going to have to scale things back to try to get the 60 votes. It kind of amazes me that after all that waiting and negotiations supposedly going on all those months, we ended up with a bill that wasn't really much of a compromise. It included everything on everybody's wish list and therefore wasn't going to be able to get all the votes it needed."

Zindler said he expects the final bill will end up including a renewable fuel standard -- the House bill called for the use of 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022, with 21 billion of those gallons coming from nonfood sources -- and the fuel-economy standards for vehicles. Beyond that, it's still a question mark, he said.

In particular, he said, the portfolio standard concerns the southern members of Congress because they don't think they have adequate wind resources to support their needs and think they will end up having to buy renewable-energy credits from other states.

"They're probably right that that's the case," he said. "Whether or not that's a good enough reason to be against the bill is another story."