National energy policy advocates in Congress have changed their tack again, introducing new, stripped-down energy legislation only days after saying the bill would not be floated on its own during this session. The bill’s champion, Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-NM, says the new bill "addresses the concerns several senators had with last fall’s conference report."

Last year, Democratic politicians were largely excluded from the bill’s creation, and their amendments were uniformly defeated on party lines. But this time around, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has made a pact with the minority leader, South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle, to add few amendments to the bill and keep the debate brief. Daschle’s farm state stands to benefit from the bill’s doubling of ethanol production.

But Senate Energy’s ranking Democrat, New Mexico’s Jeff Bingaman, says that Democrats will be forced to offer a large number of amendments "to bring bipartisan balance to the bill." "We need to get back to the tradition of passing energy legislation based on consensus and bipartisanship," he said. Bingaman added that the bill is doomed without the support of the House and the Bush administration. Domenici refused to include in the bill a controversial provision that allowed liability protection for makers of gas additive MTBE. The protections were a major reason Democrats filibustered the bill last year, but now House leaders tell Domenici the provisions must be included in order to pass.

Budget problems plagued last year’s legislation, a $31 billion package that included many pet projects and incentives to win the vote of undecided members of Congress. Trimmed to $14 billion, the new bill pushes back the budget obligations of many tax incentives until the next fiscal year.

Among the bill’s electricity provisions are mandated reliability rules and a system to enforce them, repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act (PUHCA) and of  PURPA mandatory purchase requirements, which are considered stifling to the competitive energy market. It requires FERC to streamline policies on transmission grid construction and blocks the commission from making a decision about standard market design until the end of 2006. The bill also addresses energy market manipulation and offers tax incentives for renewable energy.

Domenici claims the new bill will create 800,000 new jobs, largely by stimulating ethanol production in rural regions. "The tax incentives for renewable energy, coupled with the ethanol, clean coal and natural gas provisions, create every single job the old energy bill would have created," he said.

Under Senate rules, the revised bill will bybass the committee process and go straight to the Senate floor for debate. Last year’s bill stalled because Republican senators could not gather the 60 votes necessary to curtail the floor debate.