Gov. Patrick Morrisey Announces New Private Investments In West Virginia Energy Production

Good morning. How are you? You know, it's wonderful to see this incredible crowd. We have some really big announcements today. But let me start out by thanking our and Nick Preservati. I think Nick's done an excellent job pulling all these together. You know, We're doing things in West Virginia that you haven't seen happen for a very, very long time. But it takes a team to do that. And I want to thank all the many members of our team who have made it happen. We've got our Commerce Secretary here. We've got Christine Davies here. We have Nick here. We have Chris Morris, who has done unbelievable things and is now transitioning into a new role, which is going to continue to help us. We have so many people that are working every day. Lifting West Virginia up and taking advantage of our wonderful, our God-given amazing energy resources. And that's why this is so exciting for West Virginia. You know, I can tell you that back in 2024, when I was running for governor, I knew we had to do things a little different to really take advantage of all the amazing assets that we had. I'll tell you a story that I was out in I was out in California talking with a number of people. Who are discounting our ability to get the kind of financing we're talking about. The numbers that you're hearing about today and you've been hearing about over the past year. And I said we were going to leverage our energy resources like you've never seen before. And that's how West Virginia was going to grow. And I think what you hear today, thanks to a lot of our partners and folks across West Virginia, we're continuing to ascend. To reach heights that no one thought possible in West Virginia. But I want to start and say that it's great to be here with all of you because of how much you're contributing to America's energy future and to our state's energy future. You know, I spend a lot of time traveling across West Virginia, talking with families, talking with businesses, people who are working really hard just to get ahead. And every day when I talk to people, I hear one concern. This is part of what motivates me to do the things that I do, and I think what motivates many of you. We know that people are struggling with the cost of living, right? That's not even an argument. We know how important that is. Affordability, whether it's groceries, whether it's housing, whether it's health care, or paying the power bills, families are being squeezed. I've talked about this a lot the last year, and our energy plan is designed to address that. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, when you get an unexpected increase in your bill or prescription prices go up, you have to cut back somewhere else. Not easy for everyday West Virginians. That's the affordability crisis that we need to confront. And that's a big part of our energy plan. I've tried to make it a priority for this administration to put more money back in the pockets of everyday West Virginians. But energy... is a critical part of that effort. And as you know, West Virginia has some of the largest and deepest energy resources on the face of the earth. We have tremendous coal reserves that years fighting to protect coal. We are the Saudi Arabia of gas, and you're seeing what that means. Amazing opportunity. We're going to have a chance to expand to nuclear and other forms of energy. West Virginia's future is very bright. But once again, despite that, too many people have been struggling with their power bills. That's why we have to change that. While other states retire their reliable power plants and restricting new generation, West Virginia is taking a different approach. And it's really out of the whole supply and demand perspective that if we have so much energy, we want to utilize that energy and grow that amount. And if we do it the right way, the cost per unit will be lower and lower. And that will ensure one mechanism of many, that West Virginians are going to be paying some of the lowest power prices in America. That's the goal. Make no mistake about it. That's what motivates me to do what I'm doing. The benefits of our 50 by 50 plan and the massive capital investment coming in must flow to everyday West Virginians. I think we can all agree with that. That's why we were so ambitious in terms of what we're trying to do with 50 by 50. The more energy resources, the higher the supply, we thought we could do this in a way to then also bring meaningful relief to everyday citizens. And we are. And I'm going to explain how that's happening. But a little over a year ago, I came to you, and a lot of people were skeptical. I said, we're going to get to 50 gigawatts of energy by 2050. Can I ask you, does anyone think we're not going to get to 50 gigawatts of energy by 2050 now? I don't think so. In fact, I joke with Nick and others that we're now going to start calling the 50 by 50 plan the 60 by 40 plan or the 70 by 30 plan because it's that good, okay? We have an unbelievable opportunity, but I'd like to take a moment and put a slide up. To show a little bit of progress and give you guys perspective for the rest of your day. Take a look for just a moment about where we stood just even in July of this year. You know, we've been working hard every day. There were some people that said, oh, what are they doing? We're working on the fundamentals. We're doing it differently here. And we're leveraging our energy resources. And I won't go through every item on the list, but it's an impressive list of companies. And that's a conservative number. A conservative number. We don't over-promise and under-deliver. It's important to know. Now, from October of last year through July of 26, we had announced $12.9 billion of private sector investment and over 13,700 projected jobs. Now, to put that in perspective, that was the best year for economic development announcements in West Virginia's history. Period. Right? But then we kept going. We knew we had still a few more months left to hit that 12-month period, and we grew. And in fact, we have a big announcement today. People know at the business summit, we announced that those numbers grew up to $96 billion, right? They grew up to $96 billion. Then I challenged my team and said, we've got to get over 100. Now, I want to put this in perspective again. The biggest year on record, the best was close to $10 billion. And by the way, we're grateful for all of that. But I knew coming into this job, we had to bring capital X, private investment in, at a level the state's never seen before. And that's what we've been working on. The amount, that $96 billion, is over nine and a half times the record that had existed. And today, thanks to many people, but I want to specifically thank APCO today, we're announcing that APCO's committing $17 billion more Toward three new gigawatts of new natural gas-fired electricity generation in West Virginia. How about that? Now, I want to think about what this means. And I'm going to let APCO, at the right time, they're going to talk about the locations and the details. But this will be three gigawatts, three different plans, geographically dispersed, bring benefits to many parts of West Virginia. Expected to lead to 2,050 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs. And these are going to be good-paying jobs for West Virginians. We're talking about construction workers. We're talking about electricians. We're talking about welders, sheet metal workers, the kind of jobs that pay good money for our state. And when you get those paychecks in, they don't just stop at the job site. They support our local restaurants. Our retail establishments, when you go out and buy new clothes for your kids, and the small businesses throughout our communities. Now we still have a lot of work to do because our challenge is to get that workforce from within West Virginia and to help people to attract more people to West Virginia over the course of the next few months, next few years. Workforce improvements Increase in workforce participation will be one of the central parts of the next legislative agenda. We have to keep growing that workforce. Very, very important. It doesn't do any good to announce these projects if we're not going to put hardworking West Virginians up to work. But if you look at those three gigawatts, they're supposed to be operational by 2031. That's the same time frame as the first energy project we announced last year. Now, with today's announcement, we've reached $113.6 billion in private sector investments and over 21,000 projected jobs since October of last year. And we're going to make sure that that growth, that's not going to fall on the backs of our taxpayers. Our taxpayers are going to benefit from that because of the systems we're setting up. Those ratepayer protection pledges. So power bills will not go up. They must not go up because of these new additions. And we've been assured that they will not. And I will look to enforce that any way I can. This is going to be important. Our citizens are going to benefit from this. They are. And I know a lot of people can be skeptical about it, but we're going to have that shared savings. All West Virginians have to benefit from all the goodness going on. Now, I want to thank the legislature for their efforts. All this doesn't happen by itself. We work together with the legislature on some of the most far-reaching legislation that the state's seen in a long time. Some of the most impactful sessions occurred over the last few years. Don't let anyone pretend that didn't happen. You know what happens when you put a speed to build philosophy in place. It works. West Virginia is now better competing on the basis of cutting red tape and speed to build. You can get something up and running six months earlier. What's the economic value of that? A lot. That's the approach that we're using. And you've seen that in the different legislation that's gone through. You saw that in the 50 by 50 plan and the codification of our state's energy plan last year. There's a lot that's good that's going on. But without working with the legislature, this can't happen. So I want to thank the members of the legislature who are very supportive of this effort. And we've had a plan. We've had a vision. We're not deviating from it. It's going to work, and it's going to bring huge benefits in terms of lower prices to West Virginia. And the results are seen right here on the screen. Now, there's something else significant about today's announcement. As we look forward. This three gigawatts of announcement in one day surpasses the approximately 2.9 gigawatt John Amos power plant announcement from the early 70s. That's the largest single power generation announcement in West Virginia history. That's pretty cool. And it's not the only announcement we're making today. There's more. Because while we're going to keep increasing generation, we also have to protect the power we already have. A key piece of that 50 by 50 initiative was trying to make sure we're going to extend reasonable, useful life of coal and fight to make that happen and look at all of the available sources of energy. So I'm also pleased today that APCO is going to be announcing it's committing another $7.5 billion to upgrade its West Virginia coal-fired power plants through 2050. These are impactful announcements for our state. But once again, they're going to lead to huge benefits for our people. And I know over the last 14 years, I've constantly worked to make West Virginia America's energy state. All the litigation we filed, and it was difficult at times, right? We'd see setbacks at the lower court level and the big victories at the U.S. Supreme Court. But all of it was designed to leverage our energy resources to give our state an opportunity to truly shine. To lift up that standard of living that we've all been tirelessly working on for years. That's going to begin to happen as you see these groundbreakings come into gear. Our expansion of energy generation is going to make such a positive difference for citizens. In part because of these announcements. In part because of that ratepayer protection pledge. Those infrastructure costs, once again, they're not going to be unfairly passed along to existing customers. We're increasing energy supply to lower cost, and I want to keep reiterating that. Now let's go to the next slide of power generation. Look at the numbers we're talking about here, 27.66. Think about that. We're on our pathway to get to 50 by 50. I see a pathway by 2038 where we can get to not only the 50 by 50 framework. But we have a chance through other legislation to get our state income tax down near zero. Think of 2038. As we're growing our energy resources, parts of those new law will feed into reductions to the state income tax. That's important for us to know. We need West Virginia citizens to benefit from all this dynamic economic development. But next session, we need to do even more. More focus on workforce recruitment. retention, proper investment. We're focused on educational attainment and we look forward to working with all of you. We've been working very hard as an administration getting ready for the next session and we're anxious to partner with the legislature to accomplish really big things. So today is a wonderful day. We're now at 30 percent of the additional capacity that we need to make the 50 by 50 pledge. And once again these are announced projects But we're conservative in how we're laying them out. We have other announcements we're getting close to make that will continue to add to the West Virginia comeback story. It's meant to be different. It's meant to leverage on what we have. I'm hopeful that everyone in this room will become believers in what we're trying to accomplish. Because you're all a critical part of it. You are the reason it's all happening. Because you are the energy producers. You are the energy workers. You're the key piece in making this happen. There's a lot of buzz about West Virginia across the country. People are talking about our state from an investment perspective that they've never talked about in the past. Let's keep going. Let's keep making progress. And let's keep making sure that families get relief today. We have even more announcements. I've challenged our Office of Energy to focus on programs that deliver real, measurable results. One of that means strengthening the grid. Right, Nick? We know that improvements are underway to benefit nearly 1,900 customers in New Martinsville. And across the 10-county APCO area, upgrades will benefit more than 21,000 customers, reducing outage frequency by more than 25%. And there are a lot more customers that are going to benefit from new electricity. Through our energy efficiency programs, we're helping over 70 organizations across 33 counties. Just over a month ago, we launched something else to help everyday West Virginians. It's the West Virginia New Home Energy Rebate Program. And I'm pleased today to announce that we've received over 1,400 applications. What does this program do? It's a very neat thing. We're going to help qualified families replace outdated heating and cooling equipment. Improve insulation and make other changes that can dramatically reduce monthly electric bills. For eligible low-income families, these improvements can be made at no cost to them. And West Virginia was the first state in the country to launch under this new program. Now, when we announced this program, we talked about the potential to help tens of thousands of West Virginians. But I'd like to focus on one person in particular today. And her name is Judy Fry. Judy lives in Cabell County, a place where we're going to have another great announcement affecting kids today. Judy lives on a fixed income. Her electric bill was running over $300 a month. Now, if you're a senior and you're relying on fixed income, that's an awful lot to pay in your utility bill. But like a lot of people, she didn't have thousands of dollars sitting around to replace her heating system or make major repairs to her home. But through this new rebate program, an energy auditor inspected her home and found that the heat pumps and the water heater were nearly 20 years old, not operating at the right efficiency. They found a hole in her closet ceiling that was letting a lot of cold air in. These problems were corrected, and her outdated equipment was replaced. And here's the exciting part. Not only did Judy not pay a dime, But when she received her first electric bill after the improvements, her bill had dropped 34 percent, savings of $102 a month. That's substantial. We need to take this message of energy development, energy generation, to all the Judys around West Virginia and let them know that more energy, responsible, rate-paying pledge. We'll need more opportunities for the hardworking families of our state, because everywhere we go, we're looking out for everyday West Virginians. That's the focus. And I'm asking everyone here today, and I'm challenging all the companies here today, work with us to make sure that the benefits of our incredible energy resources flow to our citizens. I'm also pleased today to announce that Google is committing new monies. It's helped West Virginia families lower their energy costs. $10 million over the next two years, and that's going to help families in Putnam, in Kanawha, in Cabell, in Mason, in Jackson, and Lincoln. They're going to be able to make necessary home repairs so they can qualify for our rebate programs. Think about that. Everywhere where these companies are locating, there's going to be the ability to see lower energy prices. More money flowing directly to the people. That's what we're all in it for. That's what I'm in it for. We're here to build an economy where good-paying jobs can flourish, where we protect rate payers, where we strengthen our power grid, and we help families lower their monthly bills. I'm so happy to be here today. This is becoming such a wonderful tradition. I know you have a lot of incredible speakers. I want to commend you for coming, spending time here. And let me just say, if you like the last two years, the best is yet to come. We're just scratching the surface in terms of what we're going to be able to accomplish as a state. And I'm asking you to believe. Not believe because of lofty numbers that may occur in the future. Believe because now we've been focusing on the fundamentals. And we're doing this based upon a logical system, supply and demand, needs of the people, needs of other states, needs of our country, making sure that West Virginia drives America's energy comeback. We have that opportunity. You're seeing it in real time. Let's do everything we can to build on these partnerships. At the business summit, I challenged companies. We had really big announcements, right? I challenged companies, come in and work with us if you're looking for new partnerships. And we'll do more and more and more while we look out for West Virginia rate payers at the same time. I want to thank all of you for coming. I want to say God bless our amazing state of West Virginia and may God bless the United States of America. Thank you.