Sponsors (2)
The bill secures multi-year federal funding and support to scale U.S. water power and marine energy technologies, manufacturing, and workforce—improving grid resilience and domestic industry—but increases federal spending and creates allocation, timing, and administrative uncertainties that could slow or dilute benefits for some applicants and communities.
Taxpayers, energy-sector workers, and researchers: authorizes $300 million per year (FY2026–2030) for water power RD&D, providing multi-year funding certainty to accelerate projects and scale technologies.
Regional manufacturers, universities, small businesses, students, and energy workers: creates federal support to scale U.S. production of composite and additive-manufactured marine energy components, strengthening domestic supply chains and manufacturing jobs.
Students and current/future energy workers: expands training, student research, competitions, and fellowships to grow the workforce pipeline for water power and marine energy.
Taxpayers: the $300 million per year authorization increases federal spending and could raise taxpayer costs or crowd out other priorities if appropriations follow the authorization.
Energy workers, local governments, and researchers: the bill does not specify how money will be split between marine energy and hydropower, creating uncertainty about who benefits and complicating planning.
Small businesses, researchers, and applicants: changing solicitations from annual to biennial could slow funding opportunities and delay projects that rely on regular awards.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Updates DOE water power R&D authorities to boost U.S. manufacturing of marine energy components, broaden marine and hydropower program purposes, expand consultations, and add resilience and testing priorities.
Introduced January 16, 2026 by Suzanne Bonamici · Last progress January 16, 2026
Amends and reauthorizes the Department of Energy’s water power research, development, and demonstration program to expand priorities and capabilities for hydropower, pumped storage, and marine energy. It directs new emphasis on U.S.-based scalable manufacturing of composite and additive-manufactured marine energy components through partnerships with regional universities and industry, broadens stakeholder consultation for hydropower licensing to include State, local, and Tribal entities (including Alaska Native Corporations), and adds explicit program purposes for environmental assessment, grid modeling, testing, and resilience applications. The bill also updates marine energy and National Marine Energy Center authorities to cover more infrastructure and equipment, expands allowable production and resilience uses (for example, desalination, disaster recovery, aquaculture, marine carbon dioxide removal, and community microgrids), and strengthens requirements to compile environmental and economic impact data and identify testing and performance-improvement mechanisms for hydropower and pumped storage technologies.