President Donald Trump has signed a broadly bipartisan bill that will extend deadlines for construction to begin on hydropower projects around the country. 

The bill, a U.S. Senate version of the “Build More Hydro” legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Washington, last year, passed the U.S. House with a vote of 394-14 in April, having previously passed unanimously in the Senate last year. 

U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse

“This allows hydroelectric dams with their (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) license additional time to commence construction, eventually adding over 2.5 gigawatts of reliable, clean, baseload power,” Newhouse said in a statement. “We need to get every available megawatt of power on the grid to meet our growing energy demand, and this new law gets us one step closer to that goal.” 

The Senate version of the bill was sponsored by U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana. The Tri-City Development Council, or TRIDEC, was among the interest groups supporting the legislation. 

Newhouse’s office said roughly 100 megawatts of hydropower capacity was put on hold since the legislation was introduced last year because federal lawmakers had not granted the extended construction timelines. 

Newhouse has made hydropower one of the primary planks of his platform, citing their benefits to energy generation and storage, transportation, flood control and irrigation. He has worked against efforts by environmental and tribal stakeholders as well as Washington state officials to have the four lower Snake River dams removed to aid endangered migratory fish. 

To read the full text of the bill, go to: https://newhouse.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/newhouse.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/bill-text-s-1020_0.pdf