**Kuster introduced bipartisan, bicameral legislation earlier this month to rehabilitate, retrofit, or remove America’s 90,000 dams, including more than 2,500 in NH, and preserve our rivers**

**The full Subcommittee hearing is available HERE**

**Kuster’s full remarks are available HERE**

Washington, D.C. — Today, Rep. Annie Kuster (NH-02), a member of the Energy and Commerce Energy Subcommittee, participated in a Subcommittee hearing entitled, "The Changing Energy Landscape: Oversight of FERC." During the hearing, Kuster questioned Federal Energy Regulatory Commission officials about the urgency for Congress to take action to keep American dams safe and the potential that hydropower holds.

“Hydropower makes up more than 6% of electric generation nationwide and is the United States’ second-largest source of renewable energy,” said Rep. Kuster. “My bipartisan Twenty-First Century Dams Act lays out a bold plan to retrofit, rehabilitate, and remove dams to not only increase clean energy production through retrofitting dams for hydropower production but improve dam safety. This bill will help us reduce carbon emissions, create a more resilient energy system, support more than 450,000 American jobs, and improve the health of our nation’s rivers. I look forward to working with safety officials and my colleagues on this Subcommittee to get this important bill over the finish line.”

The United States has more than 90,000 dams, including 6,000 “high-hazard” dams with poor, unsatisfactory, or unknown safety ratings that would pose a threat to human life should they fail. Kuster’s bipartisan and bicameral legislation, the Twenty-First Century Dams Act, makes a $25.8 billion investment in enhancing the safety, grid resilience benefits, and power generating capacity of America’s existing dams while also providing historic funding to remove dams that are no longer necessary.

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