Mr. TONKO. Representative Dahlkemper, you know, you and our colleague from Florida sparked a thought as you were both talking about innovation and small business creation.

To the credit of the leadership in the House--and I have to credit Speaker Pelosi for really advancing the innovation economy. She believes in that investment. She understands that jobs are the greatest issue that are out there challenging this country in terms of providing the support that is required.

This Monday before I traveled here to the Nation's capital, while still in my district, I was invited to attend the 10th anniversary celebration of SuperPower, which is now producing all sorts of demonstrations in the high-temperature superconductive cable market.

As we talk about this energy system in our country, as we talk about creating our own American-produced supplies of power, we also need to remember there is a delivery system that needs our investment. The transmission and distribution system, the arteries and veins of the network, if you will, has been designed for monopoly settings. And as we have deregged in this industry, we now find that this country is not only wielding electrons from region to region but across State borders, across country borders as we look at importing power supplies from Canada.

So all that being said, the August 2003 failure that impacted the northeast of the United States, the eastern seacoast, States along the eastern seaboard, southeast Canada, millions, tens of millions of people in a blackout situation for days, if that didn't expose a gaping vulnerability of a weakness in this Nation, I don't know what would. So we need to invest in that delivery system. That is critical.

SuperPower, celebrating its 10th anniversary, is there producing high-temperature superconductive cable far more efficient than conventional cable where multiple times more electrons can be transmitted along the line.

As we look at the agenda in this country, there is no room for waste. I talked earlier about the gluttonous dependency on fossil-based fuels. If we can improve efficiencywise, we are going to be all the sounder as a Nation. So these great researchers and scientists are developing this cable.

They had in their display, at the Schenectady Museum for their 10th anniversary celebration, a piece of the cable that was used as a demonstration project in the city of Albany, New York, which proved successful. Now the work is to further develop so that we can commercialize this discovery and that we can drive down the cost so that it is truly an economic benefit. That is where R&D comes into play. It is all of that investment.

I truly believe that we, as a country, when investing in these efforts, create jobs from the trades on over to the Ph.D.'s. And when I looked at that, I realized that, here we have been investing. I was there at the front end of investment when we put down a bit of investment for capital purchases, for equipment for this startup. Now, 10 years later, they are doing great work. They are breaking their own records and are being recognized nationally and internationally.

So that has inspired me, along with conversations with small business innovators, entrepreneurs that are doing the same sort of signs and discovery that will change our response and responsiveness to a number of challenges out there.

I have introduced a bill that deals with the small business innovators. They are oftentimes in situations, scenarios that are high risk but high reward. And the angel network and the venture capital community even in this tough economy, especially in this tough economy, is somewhat skittish about going out there, lending to them on their own.

[Time: 19:30] So government has a role here to soften that blow in those high-risk but high-reward situations. My bill would take the 2007-2008 success stories with the Department of Energy, where phase one and phase two investments have been made. Investments in prototyping. You develop an idea, you bring an idea to the table, you convince DOE it's a good project, and you develop that prototype. And then you test it. And there are many success stories where they have built the prototype and it met the test.

But then we don't do the next and final stage, the third stage, which is invest to deploy it to commercialization. My measure would take those 2007-2008 success stories and--standing as inspiration is SuperPower. Ten years into it, they're breaking their own records. They're getting into demonstrations that have now been proven successful. We need to continue to invest. Now is not the time to walk away from that system. We need to invest in it. Certainly, we have potential that is limitless, and we need to go forward, and it responds to those present-day and future needs of this Nation and does it in magnanimous measure that produces jobs in every element, every sector of the workforce.

So these are the great investments. Just like we're investing in community colleges--where we'll have before us in the near future measures to invest in community colleges. One of my local community colleges is investing in clean room science technology. So that as we develop these ``clean'' rooms with the nanoscience industry with chips that are manufactured, they can then be coupled with everything from agriculture as an industry to the pharmaceutical industry to health care to energy. There's great potential there. And these are partnerships that need to be fostered by the government. This is a role where the government can produce jobs, because they're removing some of the risk, and they're there because all society benefits from these opportunities. They're great bits of discovery.

And to SuperPower, I publicly want to thank them for 10 years of a success story. And I know they're going to go on to even greater things where we can apply this into high-efficiency situations. Think of it. As we begin to grow our renewables out there with solar arrays, with solar farms, with wind farms, we are then able to take direct current cable, where there's a hundred percent efficiency, no line loss. So as you're taking that generated energy, American-produced energy, you're now making certain there's no loss of that product in its delivery mode. And we're all prospering from that.

These are the opportunities we're talking about. They were put on the [Page: H1498] back burner. MEP was told, You don't need to be funded any more. Manufacturing doesn't need our attention. Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to invest in these industries. And we can do it because we have the know-how. We invest through higher education, we invest through apprenticeships with our trade unions. We do all of this investing, but then we need to provide the hope. And the hope comes in a job--in a business that's produced that translates into jobs.

Let's do it. Let's do it in a progressive, visionary way that enables all of us to prosper. And I'm so impressed that the Democrats are putting together a strategic plan that ranges from health care reform to job creation to incentives and tax relief and credit line opening, dealing with that credit crunch and putting together the workforce training. These are the elements. These are the tools in the toolkit that will take us to a new era of job creation--some jobs not yet on the radar screen.

That's the remarkable bit of visioning here, of public policy development and resources that are put together in the budget.

So I can't thank you enough for the small business passion that you bring to this House, Representative Dahlkemper. Your track record as a small business person is that inspiration for you to then influence us in putting together packages that allow us to provide that opportunity from coast-to-coast for this great country.