Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
 
My name is Jim Asselstine. I am a managing director at Lehman Brothers, where I am the senior fixed income research analyst responsible for covering the electric utility and power sector. In that capacity, I provide fixed income research coverage for more than 100 U.S. electric utility companies, power generators, and power projects. As a research analyst, I also work closely with the large institutional investors who have traditionally been a principal source of debt financing for the power industry.

I appreciate your invitation to testify at today’s hearing regarding the nuclear power provisions contained in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. My testimony will provide a financial community perspective on the current industry activities that may lead to applications to construct and operate new nuclear power plants, and the efforts by the federal government to implement the nuclear power provisions in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Mr. Chairman, I believe that you, the ranking minority member and the other members of this committee deserve enormous credit for your efforts leading to the enactment of comprehensive energy legislation last year. Thanks to many of the initiatives and incentives in the act, the industry is now embarking on a new construction cycle including investments to upgrade and expand transmission and distribution system reliability, to ensure environmental compliance for our large coal-fired generation fleet, and to add much-needed new baseload generating capacity. These new investments will require new sources of financing for the industry.