Senator Bryan King Okay. Thank you, members. We're going to call this meeting to order. I know that the discussion of windmills in the Aging and Children Committee is something people's asked me about. And I have to tell them that this windmill issue started up in Carroll County in my district over a year and a half ago. And so I tried to get the Energy Committee and some other people to look at it, and they didn't. So I said, Well, we'll just go ahead and bring it up in this committee. And so anyway, my brother is on the Quorum Court, and so it's been a very controversial issue, at least in Carroll County, with the possibility of about 40, 50 windmills coming into Carroll County.
And so through that discussion and looking at it, I have come into contact with people from other states. And so as people know down here, I fairly let people present both sides. So last time we had the Windmill Association and some of the other companies present their side. And through this I've got in contact with, I'll say, one of our colleagues from Washington State and Representative Dye and had some really good conversations, especially with her, because she is in farming, in agriculture, just like I have. So when we got on the phone, we got off on many other issues besides windmills, and I have thoroughly enjoyed that.
And so Members, I want to introduce you to Representative Dye, and I'll let you introduce the other person, Miss Nelson. She's a staffer with Representative Dye as far as the staff. So Representative Dye, if you don't care, just tell a little bit about yourself and your area you represent and then you can go into your presentation. And if you take some questions afterwards, that would be great. And then I know you have to be gone in an hour.
And Blake here, the staff person, knows that I don't like to go over an hour, so that's not going to be a problem with me. So anyway, I'll turn it over to you. And if you want to introduce yourself and tell a little bit about yourself and go into your presentation, we'd love to hear from you.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Thank you, Senator King. And it's such an honor because I know this committee time is really scarce. But you're right, it is appropriate to have this hearing in your committee because this is about our children and our grandchildren and what we leave for them. And as a farmer myself, you know, we always try to leave the land better than what we found it. And how do you balance that with the opportunity to bring in additional income on that property with an understanding– and I think that the producers as they start to realize who they are dealing with and what they're dealing with it, it goes back to understanding what it really means to a larger part of the economy of the state and how it plays in what I would say is more like that these companies are taking the wealth producing capacity of the lands in our state and transferring that wealth to producing capacity to countries not ours. Not just other states in the United States, but it's the flow of money that goes into countries like Canada or China or Europe or wherever the countries are located. And so that's my bigger concern.
So how did we get there in Washington State? Very quickly, we passed a series of laws. It was initiated by Clean and Prosperous Washington, a think tank that was funded initially originally from Starbucks, the founder of Starbucks and the founder of Sonicare. It has pretty much anything in our large business community has, and tribes and unions have funded that operation. It has multiple layers. It has a Washington business alliance. And then it also has-- goodness. I stumbled on that. But it has plannedwashington.org. And so you have that infrastructure that then created these bills. The first one was Clean Energy Transformation Act passed in 2019. And that set up the goals, the climate goals. And they were very aggressive. We amended them to be more aggressive.
So, you know, we always talk about the hockey stick. Well, the hockey stick goes straight down on mandates for climate emissions by 2030. And so it's a radical reduction of CO2 emissions for our refineries in Whatcom County that are very productive. They provide all of the aviation fuel for Sea-Tac and the West Coast. Then, you know, we have all of the utilities that are subject to that. And any of the energy intensive trade exposed industries will be subject to the climate goals that are set. And they have to buy what I call indulgences-- they call them allowances-- to continue to operate in the state of Washington until the transformation is complete.
And then we passed follow on the Climate Commitment Act. So I look at CETA as the engine, Climate Commitment Act as the key that turns the engine on. And what it does is it puts those prices on those allowances through a trading market. We link to the California and Quebec market. And that linkage then creates a large market of allowances across those three jurisdictions. It's managed by a contractor in Canada, and it has brought in a tremendous amount of revenue above projected on our fiscal note. So above projected in the first year brought $1.146 billion of revenue.
That revenue was collected at the gas pump and at the utility bill for every constituent in Washington State. So basically it's spread the cost of climate onto, you know, everybody gets to pay their fair share for their contribution to climate change. That's how that policy functionally works. We also layer on a couple of other things I think that are interesting for you. The layer on the Clean Buildings Act, anything 20,000ft² up to 200,000 or more square feet. Most of those large buildings, a lot of them are state buildings. One of the things that's interesting about that is that you have like all of the universities and they are required to do an energy audit and transform their energy systems, their HVAC systems to heat pump. And so in the initial phase, if they don't do the audit, then they have to pay a penalty.
So I sit on appropriations and in the fiscal note, we ended up appropriating for the penalty. And then now we're appropriating for the audit. And then finally, as we've moved through this policy, we have received the first estimates on what the transformation will cost from going from like a steam plant that's natural gas to a HVAC system. And the university in my district, Washington State University, estimated $1 billion.
They had recently converted their steam plant from coal to natural gas. So we already have that sunk cost. It's brand new. It would last for a long time. And now we're being asked to change that over to heat pumps and they have to completely change all of the ducts, everything. We can't have district energy anymore on that campus. And I asked myself, what would WSU be like if you had $1 billion to invest in education? It would be substantively different. And so that to me is some of the conflicts.
And then just to finish out some of the other policies, we passed a bill, House bill 1589, which was a bill that culminated from a previous bill that allowed the state's largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to go from a regular rate adjudication through our Utilities and Transportation Commission to a multiyear rate plan, a four year rate plan. And within that, they recognized that it would increase the utility costs or the power bill to their customers. They have 1.1 million customers and it would increase their power bills substantially.
And so it allows this metric so it reaches higher up into the middle class. And so it has a metric, it triggers the metric for more people. So right now, under that plan, 60% of residential customers receive energy assistance, and that is cost shifted on to commercial and industrial ratepayers. Then they followed on with House Bill 1589, which is a natural gas process to do a natural gas ban for their entire utility. They are a natural gas generating utility. That's their primary. They also use a lot of the energy from the four Lower Snake River dams to power their utility. And so that bill is the one that gives them the opportunity to rapidly depreciate all of their natural gas assets, both the natural gas delivery to homes and industries and then also construct significant amounts of wind and solar in eastern Washington.
The reason why I went through all of these laws very carefully with you is so that you can understand that there's this platform of mandates. And those mandates have been laid on large industry. And the costs that they incur go to every individual citizen in Washington State. So there's this huge cost shift. The downfall of that is what happened this summer when I received a phone call from one of the wonderful companies in my district, Lamb Weston. They're one of the french fry producers, and they have a facility in Othello-- excuse me, in Connell. And Connell has a long time workforce. They're a generational workforce. They're a one company town and their kids largely are Spanish speaking when they enter the school system. By the time they graduate, they exceed all of the state standards on testing. They are like one of the top schools in the state and all of those kids come out completely fluent bilingual. Those families are an amazing group of folks.
And Lamb Weston announced that they were going to have to close the plant. And I looked at the announcement in Biznews, and there are several reasons that I picked out. One, their energy costs had gone up by over a third for the natural gas because it takes a lot of natural gas to boil water for processing potatoes. And then we passed some very highest minimum wage laws. And that also fell on the agricultural community. And so if you were bringing new people into the plant, you become very, very expensive workforce, which is fine. The long term people there are paid well and they stay there and it's a good job.
And then the buildings law. Big, big manufacturing facility that's been there a long time and to comply with the buildings law would have been a huge investment. I estimate about $1 billion. And they were under water with the changes that have been made since Covid, foot traffic in restaurants. 90% of potatoes are consumed in restaurants. Foot traffic in restaurants have declined significantly since Covid. And so anyway, bottom line, they needed to regroup. And in the bottom of that article, it stated that they will increase their production in their plants in Argentina and China. So meaning that we lose 337 families that depended on a wonderful job, a career in that industry. And that town, being a one company town, now has to figure out how to regroup. And so that's how these laws play out in the agriculture economy.
And so, I have the question, what is the why? And so we hear the why because according to Governor Inslee, in his most recent speech at Cop 29, he stated that, you know, climate change is an existential threat and we must move rapidly to address the issue and we have to do something. And all of you lawmakers there in Arkansas know that the word something is a pretty broadly defined word. And what is the something and why do we have to do it and what is the social cost?
So, when you go through all of the things that are happening to our local farm communities, I just want to just finally cover three of the themes that I think I'm seeing so that you can kind of evaluate. The economics of the industry is really chilling. If you look at a 100 megawatt wind farm, it takes about 150 million between federal and state subsidies. The developers, which are the ones that come in that interface with the producers and offer them the shiny object of additional revenue, but they come back for three years.
That first year of $150 million build, they can potentially be getting 53 million of that in subsidies and support from the federal and state government in our state. And so that's just cream because you get $150 million asset for 100. And then they get a three year production contract before they move it to its final destination, the ownership of the facility. And so in that three years, they could potentially be getting up to 25 million in revenue. So then that makes it so that half the cost of that build is subsidized, is the cream. And the new plant, there's not much repairs or anything because it's brand new. So it's like buying a new combine and then you trade it two years later and you have everything on warranty and you never have to pay anything for the repair. So that's kind of the dealio.
And then so I look at that and I think, wow, you know, you get $150 million asset for half off, they sell it then to a global equity instrument so that project is combined with other projects in a bucket and then that bucket goes as a line item in a portfolio. And those portfolios like Cordelio, they are the largest retirement fund for Canadians. You look at what these funds own and what they do and they're putting a renewable energy plant that may or may not be there long term because the subsidies, if they dry out. What if too much wind and solar destabilize the grid and we can't handle it, which we're experiencing? There's so many other elements. Once the big government push goes away, does the business case go away? And so you're putting retired people in a portfolio at risk and what happens there? So it's kind of like the .com bust and the real estate bust in a way. You're kind of setting up a bubble on this thing. And I'm worried about that.
The environmental thing is nobody talks about the real environmental consequences. In our state, we do the SIBA, the state environmental impact statement on it on a site by site basis. But according to Discovery Institute, if we're to comply with CETA where both Oregon and Washington have passed similar legislation, if we were to comply with that, it will be 25,000mi² of the two states on their wild lands and open spaces. So the entire view shed is taken up by wind and solar. And so the total amount of square miles is 100,000. So it's 25% of the total landmass of eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. So that's consequential.
And so I asked our state to look at the consequences of that. What is that really going to look like? How much of an impact is that going to be on our raptor populations, which can't avoid the blades? How is that going to affect because, you know, in the apple industry, you put windmills to bring warm air down to protect during a frost night. Well, these do the same thing. And I've seen data where it heats the land surface half a degree, .48 degrees. And we're trying to save ourselves from 1.5 degrees in 2100. And yet we're building these things that actually change and alter the weather patterns. What's the rain shadow in a rain fed industry like mine? What's the rain shadow effect? How is it going to affect like the stir of the air if you fly. You know that dirty air, how is that going to affect firefighting and the ability to go out and and protect your lands from catastrophic wildfire?
There's so many environmental things that we refuse to look at and we haven't quantified and given as a cost benefit on that. And then the biggest question is the social cost to our communities. When these companies come in, a lot of our landowners, they're sharecroppers. I'll admit I'm a sharecropper. We rent most of our land. And so the money goes to my landlords who live in Portland and Colorado Springs and Harvard. They live all over the place. And so that's the flow of money out of a rural community that's already been deprived of economic growth.
Our largest export out of farming country is our kids. They don't come back. And we don't have an economy or an economic base to support that. And so the social cost also is that you create haves and have nots. The haves and have nots are the guys that get the contract, the guys that don't. The community, the small town that has to live with the implications and the trade offs that other economic interests may not come because there's large amounts of land that are under an industrial wind facility. So we're talking about industrializing the entire agricultural base for renewable energy. And it's weather dependent. It creates instability in the grid. It costs a tremendous amount of money and it has a social cost.
And so the cost of the construction for Oregon and Washington is estimated to be 550 billion by 2050. So wrap your head around. Washington has 7.1 million people. Wrap your head around that cost. And the social cost is similar to what I explained to you in Connell. And there's more to come and that's my concern about it. The governor signed his last capstone bills this May. And in the speech, he mentioned the revolution. He used the word revolution five times. And to me that's what it is. It's a fundamental transfer of wealth away from the wealth producing lands that sustain our families and our communities and stabilize our nation and create peace. That wealth generating capacity is handed over to other nations and other entities that are not loyal to the communities that we serve. And that's my story. And I'm more than happy to answer lots of questions.
Senator Bryan King Thank you, Representative. Now, I know you're talking from a perspective from your state where the state has been pushing it. And like I said, it's been an issue that we've had to deal with in Carroll County for a long time or for a year. And like I said, my brother's on the quorum court. So whenever they first started coming in, if you had to look at it, what you know now, how many years have they been in your area now? Five, eight years, six years, four years?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature 12 or 14 or 15, maybe. 15 years?
Senator Bryan King Yeah. So if you.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature 10 to 15 years because Bickleten got them first.
Senator Bryan King Okay. And how tall are they in your district, typically?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature The older plants are 544ft and they're looking at 600-plus feet, 690. I mean, they're bigger than the Columbia Tower. They're way bigger than the Space Needle. It's like skyscrapers everywhere.
Senator Bryan King Yeah. And that's what they're talking about in Carroll County. And I think Eastern Arkansas, they said they're going to be 600 plus feet tall. So if you had to go back and ask the question and look at it from the-- and we talked about a little bit and I've talked to other states. From the promises they made about the economic impact and what all this is going to do versus then and now, I mean, what would be your opinion or what would you say now that before these came in?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature I would say it's a giant sucking sound. You have to look at the money. So let's say, this is how I looked at that number of 50 million in subsidies upfront. It's like there's a lot of room for negotiating a program or a way to get that to accrue to a revitalization of the economies of our rural communities. Right. And instead the lease agreements are a pittance in comparison to that subsidy margin. Right. And so a good portion of our CCA dollars, 25%, is for social justice and environmental justice. Of that 1.14 billion that's now nigh on 3 billion at this point, and it raised our gas prices by $0.50. I'll say that, too. So everybody is paying $0.50 more. We've got the second highest gas price in the nation and over a dollar of it is tax.
So I would say that those are big dampers on the general economy. But what flows back to a small town? And it's so little. And right now they're negotiating, well, maybe we ought to do community benefit agreements. And I'm like, they come in and they go, here, we'll give this to your little foundation, $250,000. And I'm thinking we need a big economy. They all tell you, they'll sell you, okay, your county will receive a big bump up in the amount of tax revenue, property tax revenue that you receive from those projects. And that's true for a time. But ours has an incentive for rapid depreciation.
And so while the stockholders for Puget Sound Energy are making bank on rapid depreciation, the rate payers are having to pay for that. And then it shifts the tax burden on to the local community. So there's a massive tax shift on to landowners and homeowners and any kind of commercial. It shifts back to the community within ten years. And so we're just at that point where we're ten years in on our county, and we're just starting to see that decline. So 50% of Garfield County's income is from windmills. It's 3 million of the 6 million line item for their property tax revenues.
So we built a $6 million government service sector that will now transfer over to the farmers because the farmers are the tax base. So it's never really seen more. You have to look up and say, what are they doing? I have a bill that produces a royalty on the nameplate capacity of these facilities and then puts it into a fund that's run like our Community Economic Revitalization Board. And then that fund will go to offer entrepreneurs and free market thinkers to consider coming back, incentivize those folks to come back and build their American dream in a small town where they can have neighborhoods where the kids can play in tree lined streets and walk to school and walkable retail and really revitalize these depleted farming towns in eastern Washington.
Senator Bryan King Yeah. And that's what some of the things up there, they're saying, well, we're going to get all this money for local schools. And so right now we do not have a tax structure for wind turbines. I need to call it by what it is, a wind turbine, not a windmill. But so, in one area of east Arkansas, they're signing in lieu of taxes. So, I'm trying to find out right now with our state funding that supplements our local schools to a certain level, if we just generate more local money, does that mean the state contributes less? So that means maybe a net zero.
We also talked about the fire danger. You know, in East Arkansas where it's flat, up there in my area where you look at the prime wind channel from the last presentation, it's up in the wooded areas. And right now we're entering our dry season with leaves on the ground. And you talked about, they say it is minimum that these catch afire, but they do catch a fire. That's correct.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature They do catch on fire. And not only that, they're in parts of our state and they are fire prone areas. The Scout clean energy project, those seven hills burn nearly every year. And we put a bill to cite the facility so that aviation assets can go in and fight the fire because with the flashy fuels, five minutes is too long. So we can burn tens of thousands of acres in 15 minutes because it's windy and dry. And so they shut that bill down. But in reality, it's still on the table to discuss because how do you fly aircraft in an industrial wind facility? It's very difficult. And they have a ten acre storage, battery storage, lithium ion battery storage.
None of our volunteer firefighters are trained on how would you fight an industrial scale lithium ion battery? And it's just watch it burn is the current standard of practice. And, you know, that's significant because that facility in particular is--- there is 400,000 people that live downwind from that facility. And so should there be something untoward happen to their storage facility that could cause catastrophic health issues. And we don't want that. And there's 100,000 people that will be living within six miles of a turbine. So it has a significant cost.
The other thing that I thought was interesting was the governor, when he threw it back to his expedited siting commission-- he, as he said, I need it. I need it full size. I need 20 more of this size, which would be 1.45 million acres. And he says, and there hasn't been any for goodness talks in the last few years. So I guess the for goodness talks are going to have to go. And I'm like, what happened to the environmentalists in this world that they could say that out loud? It bothered me.
Senator Bryan King Yeah. Let me ask you a question about the wildlife. So right now in Arkansas, every day at our farm, I'm seeing at least 15 to 30 bald eagles. I mean, can you talk about the wildlife aspect of it? I mean, I think you mentioned a bird up there that we probably don't have up here earlier. But like the wildlife aspect of it, can you discuss that a little bit?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Sure. And so I understand that there was a point where California started removing some of their wind turbines because they were just knocking the California condor to the ground. And the company will come and they will say, well, more birds die from hitting glass buildings and hitting cars. But the last time I checked, I've never hit a California condor. And so, yes, there are a lot of birds-- or more birds are eaten by cats. I've never seen my cat catch a Bald Eagle. So it's a particular kind of bird.
And I think we need to look into that more as to why it is the Raptors that are most vulnerable. But I don't want to build at 25,000 square miles and then find out that, golly, we just killed all our golden and bald eagles in here. I think that it would be nice if we could be proactive and really clear eyed about the environmental impacts.
And I think there are real environmental impacts that are not being assessed at scale. One windfarm with turbines is one thing, but landscapes of it because it's a diffuse energy supply, it takes 40 to 70 acres per turbine. And I actually looked up Arkansas' wind map and y'all don't have hardly any good quality wind compared to the Midwest. And most of the wind sheds that are really viable economically were producing consistent energy have been taken. They're the Nebraska's and the Kansas's and Oklahoma's. Those are the places that if you look at that map, and I'll send that to your committee. I think it's a real telling thing. If you look at the wind map for Washington State, the colors are purple, like a really beautiful color, a dark purple. That's the Midwest. Then there's kind of a peachy color and a little bit of orange. Those are the ones that are being looked at or sought after. So it's kind of 9 to 12, 7 to 9. And then green is like two, three, four, hardly any. And this is all measured at 80ft, the speeds, wind speeds at 80ft.
And so that to me tells me that there's something else driving the mission. And something else is the flow of money, the wealth generating capacity of American sovereign land to large global corporations that have no loyalty to the benefits of affordable, reliable energy that supplies our grid. And the whole idea of putting more and more and more onto the grid destabilizes it. I was sitting next to a lady from Bonneville Power yesterday and she was saying they have to turn the generators on and off, on and off, on and off in our dams. They have 11 dams on our system. And she said it's just taken the life out of our generators.
And so as far as the birds and stuff, I think that's a big issue, and the ground nesting birds in particular. And we have burrowing owls. We have great horned owls. Those are slow fliers and they get smacked out of the air. They can't see it.
Senator Bryan King Well, and that's some of the questions. And the difference in probably our state, you have a lot of hydroelectric power with dams and things like that. And I talked with you and I think another representative about that. So what we're seeing on that, what you see from the windmill, wind turbines, last time was that we're having these coal plants go offline and that we've got to go to this power. And even up there, you're seeing some of that debate about like where we're shifting our energy from maybe hydroelectric power, which you have a lot of up there to, we're going offline. I mean, after you're 12 years into it, do you see where the wind is going to keep up with our increasing power needs?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature You're kind of playing with two very interesting paradigms because you just said it. They pulled the coal off of the grid, which created-- in Washington State, if you looked at the actual generation and demand for Washington residents, we have more than enough. And we do export power to 17 states and Canadian provinces. So when we say we're building these things for our own little rural community, and they put up a 100 megawatt facility that serves 38,000 homes and you only have 1,200 people that live there, you have to start thinking, what is it?
And so, you know, they've already pulled the power that we need. So they destabilized the grid. Then they say we have to build renewables and they overbuild. To get to where you want to go is huge. So, you know to get enough to match what you had in your coal plant would be three times as much as the nameplate. So the nameplate capacity is 100 megawatts, you have to build 300 megawatts. And then even then, you can't fix the duck curve.
And for your folks on the committee that aren't energy, there's a duck curve. And what it is is the power demand curve during the course of a day. If it's graphed out, it looks like a duck. And so when you get up in the morning, you kick everything on you. Everybody takes a hot shower. And then you leave and go to work and then power demand goes down. And then when you get home from work, you start cooking, you do loads of wash, you run the dishwasher, whatever, and the duck curve goes up. Now we have an EV mandate in Washington State.
So the duck curve when you plug into your garage goes way up, right, because we've taken an energy source that runs our transportation sector, our gasoline and diesel, and we converted it all to electricity because we want to be 100% electric by 2050. And so you created this huge spike in the duck curve. And it's the same thing with the going to heat pumps. And so you added that to that as well. We don't have the transformers. We don't have the wires to even have a plug in every garage in every neighborhood. And the transformers are back ordered forever. So to me, it doesn't make sense.
Why would we cripple our grid prematurely without letting technology and affordability and reliability direct the energy resources to our neighborhoods, to our communities, to our states, and to our nation. Why would we do that? What is the primary mission for doing that? And when you meet with a group of farmers and they're looking at the leases for the windmills and it looks kind of nice, but they don't know how to negotiate. And you see vast diversity in what the deal is going to be, and they just pick off the cheapest deal they can get from these little groups of farmers. But when you ask them specifically, so everybody in this room is doing this because you feel deeply in your heart that you're doing something to save us from catastrophic climate collapse, they'll laugh at you.
But the other thing is, is that when you look at the data-- Discovery Institute just published a study in November, and it shows that if we do everything we in Washington State could potentially reduce the temperature, global temperature by 1/1000th of a degree. And that's less than what you can read on a thermometer. And so there's no way to confirm that for 500 billion.
Senator Bryan King Yeah. And we're having that debate. I mean, several years ago, you and I talked about I went in several years ago, we had the natural gas boom here in the central part of Arkansas, which when the natural gas price was real high, it made it where they could profitably drill here and extract more natural gas. When the natural gas price tanked, I mean, a lot of them have pulled out. So we still have a lot of natural gas. We're trying to develop lithium down here in south Arkansas. But right now, that's what we're trying to do before our legislative session.
And it's what's been valuable because, like I said, I would sit here right now today and not know how to ask questions other than this issue has been going on for a year in Carroll County. And I've got connected with people around the country to try and have a debate because, like you said, up in Carroll County and East Arkansas, they're coming in to these farmers or absentee landowners and saying, hey, do you want to make money out of this? And it's a profit away. And then we all want to look at that for economic development in any district. So we appreciate you. Does any members of the committee have any questions or anything like that?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature I have time to stay longer, but I know you want to end by on top of the hour anyway. So go ahead. Yeah.
Senator Bryan King Senator Stubblefield, we're trying to get you recognized here. You may need to go help him. We've switched over our things and several of us, you can tell by looking at us, don't really take to new technology. And we have to learn. So we have to have these smart young people go explain to us how to do this.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature And that's why Camille is sitting on this committee meeting.
Senator Bryan King Yeah, I'm sitting here talking to Blake. I know Blake and your staffer could have a lot of discussions about-- so they're moving him to another portal here. So while he's doing it, one of the discussions I had, I think Vermont, I found out, put a moratorium on windmills because they didn't have the capacity to get out the grid. That's probably some of the things we need to look at. We need to really look at our grid system, how are they going to transport. Before they come in here and set up and do something, would you say it's critical for us to have discussions really quick about what is your plan, how are you getting it on the grid, you know, some type of thing that we know ahead of time, these questions about how to transport on the grid, use that, is it necessary. The other part is-- that's one question. The second question I have, again, is what you were saying about our wind area down here is nothing like, I mean, I go to Oklahoma or Kansas.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Why they build them there in a non efficient area with a very inefficient technology that doesn't serve the demand curve very well because it's running when there is no demand and there's no way to store it except through hydro power, in our case, or batteries, which are toxic and require a lot of mining, millions of tons of mining. Remember when America was opposed to mining? Anyway, so that whole thing is just follow the money. And it's the incentives. It's the renewable energy credits that they get. It's the cap and trade deals that they get. It's the sales to global equity firms and moving the wealth producing capacity that you would have in your community out to global firms that you have no control. You don't even know who owns all the pieces of their portfolio. Love to know that. I think you need to really think about it in terms of is this real economic development? Because that's what I told the governor. He said, he's like, well, this is going to be great for rural communities. No, the money does not land in the rural economy like agricultural production does. The farmers that live there, that worship in churches there, those people, they invest in their community. That's what sustains your economic base.
Agriculture is a base for economies in our states, and we're putting in an opportunity for people to exploit our wind resource and exploit the revenues of our tax payers and take it out into their own portfolios. And I think that that's the fundamental problem with the industry itself. It's like a great massive shift of power and money to governments and global companies. I want to call it an oligarchy, but I'm trying to avoid that, but I just did. So go ahead with the next question.
Senator Bryan King Okay. I think Senator Stubblefield is recognized for a question. All right. Okay. There we go. All right. Senator Stubblefield is recognized.
Senator Gary Stubblefield Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Am I speaking to Mary?
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature You are, Senator. It's nice to see you.
Senator Gary Stubblefield Nice to meet you, too. You know, as someone who served on the Energy Council for 14 years, I have listened to groups discuss this particular topic for the last four years. We wouldn't be sitting here talking about putting in windmills in a place like Arkansas because, like you said, I've seen the maps and I've seen all the topographical. Arkansas is not meant for wind power. I mean, all the states you mentioned, like Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas. But even then, we wouldn't be building these things were it not for government subsidies. That is the only reason we're building.
Under this administration, they have set goals aside for us to put windmills, all of us, even in the ocean. They're killing whales. They're doing things that the Sierra Club should be fighting against and killing all these birds that the Sierra Club normally would be in here arguing against. And it reminds me a lot of the electrical outlets that our government just put in, spent $8 billion and put in one charging station. Yes, that is--
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Yes.
Senator Gary Stubblefield That is the kind of waste and abuse that this whole program will bring. There's no common sense in any of this. None. And President Biden himself said he would like for us to be totally green by the year 2050. Do you know what the cost of that is to change our grid to build--
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Wasn't it like 88 trillion or something or have we gone up from there?
Senator Gary Stubblefield It was 50 trillion. And we owe 36 trillion. And we're going to add another 50 trillion producing vehicles that people do not want. The car dealers are parking them behind their garage because they can't sell them. And this whole thing is to me is a governmental joke, but it's the liberal agenda. And they want to produce something and tell people what they have to drive instead of letting the American people make the choice of whether-- I don't want anything against electric. If you want to buy electric, go ahead and buy electric. But don't tell me I have to buy electric.
Countries like Pakistan and India and China that are building coal fired plants without scrubbers and filters, one week. All of that, all of that smoke and soot coming out of those huge, huge towers, they're being caught up in the jet stream. They're traveling around the globe and they're going to wind up right here. And everything we do like this is not going to change the temperature one iota. I'm a farmer. I've watched this very closely and I've studied it. And I've listened to a lot of people talk at the Southern States Energy Board and the Energy Council. I've been to those coal fired plants in Wyoming and in South Dakota, where you can eat off the floor.
The scrubbers and the filters and what comes out of those stacks is nothing but steam. But we're allowing China and Pakistan and India and other countries over to build these coal fired plants with no protections at all for the environment is concerned. So this is absolutely ludicrous what we're doing. And the American people are going to be stuck with the bill. So I appreciate you coming and I appreciate you testifying.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Thank you, Senator. I appreciate your comment. You bring up a very important point as to the geopolitical why. And, you know, why would we do this? And I think that there's a broader issue. We're looking at building code to council changes that happened in our state. And I bring this forward just for your consideration. So the building codes, we had had a number of natural gas ban bills that went through our committee. And thanks to the trade unions, we were able to keep those from becoming law. And then shortly thereafter, a technical advisory group was formed in the Building Code Council. And the language from the technical advisory group was drafted by an organization called Rocky Mountain Institute. It's out of Boulder, Colorado. That organization had in the past about 60 attorneys and a small budget. And it has now morphed from a recent 2020 report and 2024 report to 550 attorneys and $150 million budget.
And it is also associated with a couple of other NGOs that do grants to NGOs and community organizations similar to Rocky Mountain Institute, to do the technical work to implement the climate policies that are focused on policy. And so they bring the policy agenda for China, which was stated in Rocky Mountain Institute's annual report that China wants to get green energy, yet they're building coal fired plants. Every month, a new one crops up to manufacture and mine and process all of the materials and all of the equipment.
A large percentage of the wind mills that are being installed in Washington State are Chinese manufactured. Certainly all of the magnets inside the motors, the only place on earth that they can source the materials for that magnet is China. All of the cobalt for the solar panels is being sourced from a mine that's Chinese owned with the nation to nation agreement with the Congo to build road infrastructure and water infrastructure for the Congo, which they're failing on that promise. But they're mining with children, children that when they enter the mine, their life expectancy in the mine is about two years. And those children are dragging cobalt out with their bare hands into wicker baskets. The mine that I have video of has 50,000 children in there mining the materials for the green transformation or revolution that we're experiencing here. So I think that the key thing is to note to yourselves that this is being driven by a foreign adversary.
The idea of it is being driven by a foreign adversary for A, to weaken our energy sector nationally, to get us to go to a fossil free future. Do you know how much diesel it takes to run a Navy? And also to cripple us financially. We will fall under our own weight with these policies. That is a big issue with me. Don't know how to bring it up, but I just want you to know that if you track where the money from the Climate Commitment Act went, 25% of it was allowed to go to community organizations and NGOs working on social justice, environmental justice. It empowers these organizations. They're actually writing policy.
So that tag committee created a natural gas ban, which we passed. We passed that natural gas ban through administrative council. It's not a legislative body and has no authority. Now that's how we end up with those huge bogeys on our buildings, on our universities. That's how we get to that billion dollar bogey on our university. And so you look at how this plays out into our society and now you look at how they're imposing themselves and really exploiting the vulnerabilities of our farming communities to take our land and our wealth capacity. That's the big story here. It's a bigger picture than what we're willing to accept.
The growers, I don't begrudge them because we've been, you know, beans and rice for a long time and trying to stay economically viable for a long time. But the fact is that this is something that's fundamental to the sovereignty of our United States of America. When we talk about all the Chinese are buying farmland, no, no. But they're doing public policy that will fundamentally transform our economy into a much weaker, much more dependent economy. And our environmental community should be horrified that we're mining in Chile, their national park, that we're putting the Uyghurs at work to build solar panels, that we're allowing children to be killed in mines in the Congo.
That's the thing. Meanwhile, it will not build our world economies. We will continue to depopulate. Bickleton is a good example of that. The company built a school for the 15 children so they didn't have to commute 100 miles a day. And then they turned around and now 15 years later, there was just a few children, but they did that for that community. It was a community benefit for exploiting their wind resource. It turns around, now there is only six children that enrolled this year. Why? Because all the families left. That's why. And those are the pictures that I sent to you, Senator, of the windmill that was burning and also the solar farm that was burning.
Senator Gary Stubblefield Well, I've read a great deal about the children and how they're treated in China as slave labor. And it just breaks my heart because this is such a sinister plan against the United States of America, because China is not our friend. I don't know how long it's going to take us to realize that they're not our friend. The carbon content in our atmosphere today is .04. Thirty years ago, it was .04. We can't drop below down to two because we would no longer have plant life. So we haven't really not moved the scale barely at all in those many years.
And yet, why all of the sudden have we had everything shifted to a green energy? And I think it's a liberal policy. And I'm not sure that-- it's a plan to destroy this country and take over our country. And I'm hoping that the new administration-- and I think they will-- put a stop to some of this insanity over this green energy. So thank you again. I appreciate you coming and testifying.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature All right. Thank you for giving me the time. I appreciate you.
Senator Bryan King All right. Thank you, Senator Stubblefield. And since we are a little bit over our hour, we're going to let go. And then Blake, I always tell Blake to try and remind me that an hour is about all I go. So, Camille, we want to thank you for being on there. I certainly know as somebody, I think next year I'll have been around here 20 years, and so I know the staffers. I used to think when I first come in, they worked for us now. I consider them my big brothers and sisters. So we thank you. So we thank you, Representative Dye, for coming in. And I certainly look forward to more visits.
And I will apologize ahead of time if I ever mess up, because I know you're two hours behind us. And as a farmer, I get up early. So if I ever text you at 6:00 in the morning here, it's 4:00 in the morning there. It's just because I'm going to forget about the time zone. So but I do want to thank you guys for participating in this.
We're beginning the discussion on this and we're going in our session. So I just wanted to present both sides, and I think you've done that very well and we appreciate that. And so hopefully sometime at a conference or maybe some time, we can talk to our energy committee and come up there and visit Washington State. We'd love to do that. So we want to thank you for participating today.
Representative Mary Dye, Washington State Legislature Thank you so much. And I'll send you some data. Thank you again.
Senator Bryan King Okay. Thank you very much. All right. If there's no other questions, we'll call this meeting adjourned.
