A major expansion of battery storage may be the most economical and environmentally beneficial way for Illinois to maintain grid reliability as it phases out fossil fuel generation, a new study finds.

The analysis was commissioned by the nonprofit Clean Grid Alliance and solar organizations as state lawmakers consider proposed incentives for private developers to build battery storage.

“The outlook is not great for bringing on major amounts of new capacity to replace the retiring capacity,” said Mark Pruitt, former head of the Illinois Power Agency and author of the study, which suggests batteries will be a more realistic path forward than a massive buildout of new generation and transmission infrastructure. 

The proposed legislation — SB 3959 and HB 5856 — would require the Illinois Power Agency to procure energy storage capacity for deployment by utilities ComEd and Ameren. Payments would be based on the difference between energy market prices and the costs of charging batteries off-peak, to ensure the storage would be profitable. The need for incentives would theoretically ratchet down over time. 

“As market prices for power go up, your incentive goes down,” Pruit said. “The idea is to provide an incentive that bridges the gap between the cost of battery technology and the value in the market. Over time, those will equalize and level out.” 

The bills, introduced in May at the end of the legislature’s spring session, would amend existing energy law to add energy storage incentives to state policy, along with existing incentives for nuclear and renewables. 

The study noted that Illinois will need at least 8,500 new megawatts of capacity and possibly as much as 15,000 new megawatts between 2030 and 2049, with increased demand driven in part by the growth of data centers. Twenty-five data centers being proposed in Illinois would use as much energy as the state’s five nuclear plants generate, according to nuclear plant owner Exelon’s CEO Calvin Butler Jr., quoted by Bloomberg. 

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) found in its summer and winter 2024 assessments that within MISO and PJM regional grids, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana are all at “elevated” risk of insufficient capacity. 

“NERC, PJM, MISO and the Illinois Commerce Commission have all identified the potential for capacity shortfalls,” said Pruitt. “You do have some options for alleviating that. You can build transmission and bring in capacity from outside the state. You can maintain your current domestic generating capacity [without retiring fossil fuel plants]. You could expand your domestic generating capacity. And an independent variable is your growth rate. All these have to work together, there’s no silver bullet. We know there are major challenges on each of those fronts.” 

Gloomy numbers 

The latest PJM capacity auction results showed capacity prices increasing from $28.92/MW-Day for the 2024/25 period to $269.92/MW-Day — a nearly 10-fold increase — for the following year. That “translates into an annual cost increase of about $350 for a typical single-family household served by ComEd,” Pruitt said. “The increase in costs indicates that more capacity supply is required to meet capacity demand in the future.” 

There are many new generation projects in the queue for interconnection by MISO and PJM, but many of them drop out before ever being deployed because of unviable economics, long delays, regulatory challenges and other issues. A recent study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory noted that while interconnection requests for renewables have skyrocketed since the Inflation Reduction Act, only 15% of interconnected capacity was actually completed in PJM and MISO between 2000 and 2018, and experts say similar completion rates persist. 

“This finding indicates that deploying sufficient new capacity resources to offset [fossil fuel] retirements is not likely to occur in the near term,” said Pruitt. “Just because something is planned doesn’t mean it gets built.” 

Meanwhile the state is running out of funds for the purchase of renewable energy credits (RECs) that are crucial to driving wind and solar development. The 2024 long-term renewable resources procurement plan by the IPA shows the state’s fund for renewables reaching a deficit in 2028, so that spending on RECs from renewables will have to be scaled back by as much as 60%. 

Long-distance transmission lines could bring wind energy or other electricity from out of state. But planned transmission lines have faced hurdles. The Grain Belt Express transmission line, in the works for a decade, was in August denied needed approval from an Illinois appellate court. The transmission line, proposed by Invenergy, would have brought wind power from Kansas to load centers to the east. 

“That sets it back years,” Pruitt said. “Transmission is a very long-term solution. I’m sure people are working diligently on it, but it’s five to 10 years before you get something approved and built.” 

Value proposition, solar benefits 

Pruitt’s study found that if 8,500 MW of energy storage were deployed between 2030 and 2049, Illinois customers could see up to $3 billion in savings compared to if they had to foot the bill for increased capacity without new storage. The savings would come because of lower market prices in capacity auctions, as well as investment in new transmission and generation that would be avoided. 

Pruitt found that $11 billion to $28 billion in macro-level economic benefits could also result, with blackouts avoided, reduced fossil fuel emissions and jobs and economic stimulus created. 

Pruitt’s analysis indicates that the incentives proposed in the legislation would cost $6.4 billion to customers. But the storage would result in $9.4 billion in savings compared to the status quo, hence a $3 billion overall savings between 2030 and 2049. 

“Solar is great, but solar is an intermittent resource; battery storage when paired with solar allows it to be far more reliable,” said Andrew Linhares, Central Region senior manager for the Solar Energy Industry Association. “Battery storage is not as cheap as solar, but its reliability is its hallmark. Combining the resources gives you a cheap and reliable resource.” 

“Solar and storage is this powerful tool that can help reduce costs for consumers and create new jobs and economic activity,” he continued. “I don’t believe that same picture is there for building out new natural gas resources. Anything that helps storage, helps solar and vice versa. CEJA sees these two technologies as being joined at the hip for the future, they are being seen more and more as a single resource.”

Study suggests a big role for grid battery storage as Illinois shutters its coal power plants is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A controversial Illinois coal plant that has locked municipalities across the Midwest into financially crushing contracts could be forced to close within a decade under proposed state clean energy legislation. 

The Clean Energy Jobs Act would require mandatory closure dates for all coal plants in the state, including the Prairie State Energy Campus, a 1,600-megawatt southern Illinois power station that is by far the state’s largest carbon emitter.

Shutting down the plant would be a major climate victory, but it wouldn’t necessarily provide financial relief for cities and ratepayers, which is why clean energy and consumer advocates are calling for elected officials to address the enormous debt associated with the troubled plant.

“Sadly a lot of the stuff we all feared would happen has come home to roost,” said Sandy Buchanan, executive director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, which has published many reports on Prairie State. “The only reason Prairie State is operating at the level it is, is because it has these 50-year guaranteed contracts with cities essentially locked into buying the power. No one would buy the power if it was just a market choice.”

A new report by the Rocky Mountain Institute shows that Illinois customers paid near market rates for power from Prairie State since it was built in 2012, but the contracts have also saddled them with debt far beyond the norm. Other analyses, including by Buchanan’s organization, show customers have paid far more than market rates for power, in addition to debt payments. 

Prairie State spokesperson Alyssa Harre said the Rocky Mountain Institute report is “flawed, relying on conjecture” involving overly optimistic projections for energy efficiency and renewable power available on the market.

“Relying on the market is a dangerous gamble,” Harre said. “This was proven yet again during the most recent winter weather events in Texas and the rolling blackouts and significant price spikes that followed.”

Under its complex web of contracts, Prairie State is essentially owned by nine public power agencies that serve almost 300 municipal utilities and electric cooperatives in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, Virginia, Missouri and West Virginia. The members are paying for $5 billion worth of bonds issued to build the plant. 

“The contracts are difficult to break,” said J.C. Kibbey, Illinois clean energy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which commissioned the Rocky Mountain Institute report. “One recourse is to close the plant — but the ownership structure is so diffuse it’s difficult for any utility to do that on their own. It’s a wicked collective action problem. The good news is, there is a way out: The state has the authority to close the plant and help the utilities escape from these contracts, which the Clean Energy Jobs Act would do.”

Harre countered that legislation closing the plant would harm Illinois.

“Prairie State and its public power owners urge our legislators to develop and support policies that enable the long-term success of technologically advanced, baseload plants, like Prairie State,” she said. “Overly aggressive and unproven targets that call for the removal of fossil fuels prematurely or add unnecessary taxes will put customers at risk for increased energy costs and more frequent outages. Illinois is currently a net exporter of power. If legislation is passed in the General Assembly to prematurely shutter baseload plants like Prairie State, Illinois will need to import baseload power from states, likely from less efficient plants.”

Making the best of a bad situation 

Under the proposed Clean Energy Jobs Act in Illinois, the state Environmental Protection Agency would set closure dates for all coal plants, prioritizing those with disproportionate environmental justice impacts and emissions. The Rocky Mountain Institute report examines a scenario where Prairie State would have to close by 2030.

Prairie State has widely been considered a debacle since its inception, with construction costs ballooning beyond predictions and generation delayed and stalled by technical problems — all at a cost to ratepayers and municipalities. Some small municipalities have faced bankruptcy because of their involvement, and pleaded and filed lawsuits to try to get out of the deal. 

“It’s somewhere between disastrous and catastrophic,” said David Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “There’s a lot of money communities have spent and are spending for technology that is obsolete, out of date. I would hope communities that own pieces of Prairie State will study what it will cost when they have to transition away from the plant. Because that’s going to happen — I can’t tell you it will close tomorrow or in five years, but it’s going to happen.”

If Prairie State closes before the contracts are up, which many see as inevitable, ratepayers could face a similar situation to during past temporary plant shutdowns: paying for power elsewhere while still making promised payments for Prairie State. 

“Closing the plant before the end of its useful life would essentially force communities to pay for two sources of power: the energy they have already bought through their partnerships with Prairie State, and replacement power to cover that loss,” Harre said. “That is an additional cost communities and taxpayers cannot afford, especially as communities across Illinois and the country struggle to make ends meet due to the negative economic impacts created by the pandemic.”

Experts say there is no good way out of the situation, but closing the plant sooner than later and looking for ways to reduce the debt would help.

“When this plant was built, plenty of folks were critiquing the climate risks of putting this thing up, including legislation like a carbon tax that would make it less economic,” said report co-author Kevin Brehm, co-op and municipal utility lead for the Shine Initiative at the Rocky Mountain Institute. “Now we’re seeing that happen. The coal supply chain is collapsing, and at the federal and state level there’s a chance of real action on carbon.” 

In 2019 Prairie State was chosen as the site of a $15 million Department of Energy research site for carbon capture and storage; Prairie State Generating Company, which runs the plant, was slated to invest $3.75 million in the project. Researchers said that if carbon capture and storage was fully implemented at Prairie State, it could be the largest such retrofit in the world. And without carbon emissions, it might not need to close under an Illinois energy law. 

Harre lauded the carbon capture and sequestration experiment, noting that the Department of Energy award had bipartisan support from U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Democrats, and Republican Reps. Mike Bost and John Shimkus.

“This could provide broad value for closing the gap between today’s technologies and long-term carbon reduction goals,” she said. 

But Schlissel sees that road as leading to another possible boondoggle. 

“Adding carbon capture is unproven and extremely expensive,” he said. “So these poor communities and their customers would get stuck with higher costs due to carbon capture which won’t work as well as proponents claim.”

Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain Institute report notes that if customers of Prairie State aren’t able to move to replace that power relatively soon, they may miss out on the opportunity for low-cost solar and wind power purchase agreements. 

A mine in the mix

Prairie State is supplied by a nearby coal mine, which would lose its sole major customer if the plant closes. Peabody Energy initially owned the mine and spearheaded the construction of the power plant, but it sold off most of its ownership shortly after the project launched and got rid of its entire stake in 2016.

“The Prairie State coal plant is like a Venus flytrap,” Kibbey said. “Peabody coal and their friends who developed the plant got all these utilities to sign on with the promise of a sweet deal. By the time the utilities figured out the plant was a disaster, it was too late — they were already trapped in these onerous contracts.”

Experts worry that under the contracts, ratepayers and municipalities could be on the hook for mine reclamation and coal ash cleanup as well as the plant debt.

“These communities through the vehicle of Prairie State don’t only own a plant,” Buchanan said, “they own a mine, and they own coal ash disposal — all of which can have a lot of environmental liabilities,” 

Harre noted that the room-and-pillar method of mining used means less subsidence than the longwall method typically used in Illinois mines. She said the coal ash repository on-site has environmental controls, and the company sells coal combustion residuals for reuse — including as an alternative to Portland cement in concrete, “effectively offsetting thousands of tons of carbon dioxide while also providing economic benefit to its owners.”

In all the Prairie State energy complex employs more than 650 people, Harre said.

“I don’t know of any coal plant out there with as complex an ownership as this one, this is one of a kind,” said Brehm, noting the mine-mouth plant as part of the package. “It just means a whole lot of assets and jobs tied into it.” 

The Clean Energy Jobs Act includes extensive provisions for a “just transition” away from the coal economy, including funds collected from fossil fuel industries used to retrain coal workers and support communities that lose tax revenue from closing plants and mines. Such programs would help ease the job losses and other impacts of the Prairie State plant and affiliated mine closing, Kibbey said. 

Refinancing options 

Paying for coal plants that have closed because they were no longer economically viable is increasingly a problem for ratepayers nationwide. Refinancing the debt, often through a mechanism called securitization, is one option to relieve the burden. Securitization involves selling low-interest bonds to cover the debt, so that ratepayers are paying interest on those bonds rather than the higher-interest-rate initial debt. 

Investor-owned utilities are generally guaranteed a rate of return — profit — on their investments that can be reduced or eliminated during refinancing, yielding more relief for ratepayers. At Prairie State, the stakeholders are mainly municipally-owned utilities and cooperatives that do not have that rate of return, so savings can’t necessarily be achieved on that front. 

But Brehm said the Illinois Commerce Commission could help with refinancing by guaranteeing the bonds that would be sold to reduce the debt. “We want to think about creative solutions to deal with this debt burden, which could be debt subsidization from the state,” Brehm said.

The study, which focused primarily on Illinois, found that “refinancing the debt with a ratepayer-backed security could allow plant owners to reinvest in clean energy solutions while saving Illinois ratepayers more than $300 million.”

Harre said securitization would not be a good option, arguing: “Securitization is an elaborate long-term refinancing of debt that simply extends the remaining debt to a much longer time period. The idea would be to lower today’s costs by obligating future customers. Should Prairie State close as suggested by the RMI [Rocky Mountain Institute] plan, future customers would receive no benefit on a resource for which they are paying.”

Brehm said municipal utilities and co-ops may be afraid of closing down a plant with lots of debt outstanding, and they may think they need to recoup that debt quickly once the plant closes — which would mean spikes for ratepayers. But he said that position is a “fallacy.”  

“We’ve heard the concern that if you’re holding all this debt but don’t have that big asset [the operating plant] to back it up, you could get yourself in trouble with the credit agency,” he said. But there are options for “taking debt off your balance sheet and putting it in a different bucket, that wouldn’t get you dinked” on credit scores. 

Kibbey said the recent study underscores that point. 

“There are voices out there that have been trying to scare us for years by saying how expensive it will be if Prairie State closes,” he said. “This is solid analysis showing the opposite. It’s true that even if the plant closes, utilities that bought into Prairie State will still hold the debt for what it cost to build the plant. But they don’t need to continue to buy overpriced power on top of that. There are financing options … that could help lessen the debt burden.” 

Buchanan said that while securitization could be an option, municipalities should consider more drastic action to avoid the burden of a deal that was unfair and deceptive — as her organization sees it — from the beginning. Lawsuits have already been filed about the contracts, and Buchanan thinks the potential plant closure should spur elected officials to examine their options and work together. 

She noted that the bonds sold to build the plant are held primarily by large financial institutions that can afford a loss, if municipalities are simply released from provisions of the contracts. 

“Because Prairie State involves so many communities in so many states, in our view it would require some political will in a number of these communities to challenge the deal they were given and the bond issues,” Buchanan said. “Sometimes when you have a really bad deal, the bondholders have to take a haircut, people just can’t pay it back.”

Illinois legislation could free towns from dirty power but not the payments is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The proposal would create a nonprofit that would design and run the bank with oversight from an 11-member board.

Illinois would get a “green bank” to finance equity-focused clean energy investments under the latest version of the Clean Energy Jobs Act pending in the state legislature. 

If the proposal passes, Illinois would join more than a dozen states including Florida, New York and Connecticut that use publicly funded green banks to leverage private investment for renewables, energy efficiency and other projects, especially in communities that have been underrepresented in the clean energy economy. 

The state-level proposal comes as a federal bill with bipartisan support would create a national green bank — dubbed the Clean Energy Accelerator —  that would work in tandem with state banks. 

The general idea of green banks is that they can provide loans directly for projects that would not be funded otherwise, because traditional financial institutions see them as too high-risk, too small, or because they aren’t familiar with the economics of clean energy sectors. 

Green banks can also leverage private investment by making it more attractive for banks or other lenders to offer standard loans or other financing to clean energy projects. Green banks can promise to cover loans if a recipient defaults, for example, and by taking on that risk they can convince banks to offer loans at reasonable interest rates rather than denying loans or charging high interest rates. 

This is especially helpful if a traditional lender doesn’t understand the potential payoff of solar energy or energy efficiency, for example, or if a small business or church doesn’t have enough credit history to receive the needed loan.

“It’s not about concessional finance, it’s about driving down the terms of private capital to where they should already be if they had more clarity on risk level,” said Jeffrey Schub, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Green Capital, which is pushing the national accelerator plan. “A commercial bank might not loan to an efficiency project for less than 10% [interest] but that doesn’t mean it warrants 10%, because there’s really no risk — it should be 4% or 5%.” The high rate, Schub said, “is just driven by that bank having little prior experience — not knowing the depth of the market.”

An annual report from the Coalition for Green Capital and the American Green Bank Consortium says that in 2019 green banks nationwide invested $1.5 billion directly and sparked $3.8 billion in private investment. About a third of the investment went to develop community solar. And, Schub said, defaults on the banks’ loans are extremely rare. 

Through its support of state banks or through direct investments, the proposed national green bank could also finance solar, storage and energy efficiency for low- and moderate-income households, plus job training, electrification of home heating, grid infrastructure to facilitate renewables, electric vehicle conversion, utility-scale renewable construction, and more. 

Finding the money 

The Clean Energy Jobs Act proposed in Illinois does not include extensive details about how the green bank would be structured, but it calls for the creation of a nonprofit entity that would design and run the bank with oversight from an 11-member board of six elected and five appointed members, including a representative of a minority-owned business and others with expertise in equity, and two labor union representatives. The proposal was crafted in consultation with the Coalition for Green Capital and by looking at best practices of other state banks, including Connecticut’s, said John Delurey, Midwest director of Vote Solar. 

“Once we realized that barriers to capital and barriers to financing were some of the most insidious and pervasive,” Delurey said, those working on the bill consulted with community partners and minority-owned businesses to come up with the green bank proposal.

The Clean Energy Jobs Act’s description of the green bank emphasizes that it would prioritize investment in underrepresented and environmental justice communities and the funding of projects run by and employing Black, Indigenous, and people of color. 

The green bank would be separate from but complement the mission of other equity-focused programs proposed in the Clean Energy Jobs Act, including workforce training and an accelerator for clean energy businesses owned by, employing and serving marginalized communities. 

Delurey said the bill language is “designed to inform the structure of the nonprofit [running the bank] itself, to ensure the board is representative of the communities it helps serve, to have guardrails for the lending they can do, and specific products as suggestions, addressing specific gaps in the financing landscape.”

The Clean Energy Jobs Act calls for Illinois’ green bank to raise $100 million in seed capital funded through a pollution tax on fossil fuel extraction and emissions. Delurey said the bank could receive additional funding from philanthropists, the federal government and other sources. 

“We anticipate a lot of federal money will be looking for regional and state-based entities to receive and deploy it,” Delurey said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re trying to get this off the ground as soon as possible.”

Schub explained the national bank proposed by federal legislation would make loans of its own and also offer funding and logistical support to state green banks. He noted that the majority of green bank investment comes through leveraging private financing, but as some state banks get more “financially mature” they are increasingly able to offer financing directly. 

Versions of the national green bank proposal passed the U.S. House of Representatives twice in 2020, as part of infrastructure and energy innovation bills, and a bill with the proposal in the U.S. Senate was co-sponsored by then-Sen. Kamala Harris. President Joe Biden has included a green bank in climate and environmental justice proposals. Hence proponents are confident that a federal program will be created by legislation in the near future. 

“It’s not really about politics, it’s always been a bipartisan or nonpartisan issue,” Schub said. “The main barrier has always been funding — lots of states do not have a billion dollars like New York state to put into its green bank to provide seed capital for investment. Illinois has not had financial resources, and now every state is even more stretched.” 

A federal bill, as he and other proponents see it, would pave the way for green banks in Illinois and other states.

Creating jobs and equity 

Climate Jobs Illinois, the coalition of labor unions heavily involved in negotiations over energy legislation, are backing the federal green bank proposal, in part because they hope it would fund their proposed Carbon Free Schools program. That program would create 4 gigawatts of solar and spur energy efficiency upgrades in Illinois public schools, in part through earmarking solar renewable energy credits for schools and creating a low-interest loan fund.

Specifically, the plan would finance solar owned by schools with 1.5% interest rates supported by a state-run revolving loan fund, capitalized partly with federal funds. 

The labor coalition recently released statements from U.S. senators and representatives from Illinois — including Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, co-founder of the bipartisan Congressional Solar Caucus — calling for clean energy infrastructure investments with union and other labor provisions. 

“If there’s ever a year [to pass the national bill], this would be it,” said Matt Lehner, a spokesperson for the labor coalition. “The stars are aligned.”

Lehner said the coalition does not have a position on a state-run green bank as proposed in the Clean Energy Jobs Act. 

The Clean Energy Jobs Act is backed by clean energy advocates and consumer and community groups, while renewable developers generally support competing proposed legislation known as Path to 100. At a press conference announcing the reintroduction of the Clean Energy Jobs Act in this year’s legislative session, elected officials talked about the need for spurring clean energy development — including through the green bank — in communities underrepresented in the clean energy economy, and disproportionately affected by fossil fuels. 

“We have a plan to create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs,” said state Sen. Robert Peters, part of the Black Caucus. “Let’s be clear. We don’t just want [electric vehicle] charging stations, rooftop and community solar, and energy efficiency programs completed in Black neighborhoods and communities. We want Black workers installing them and we want Black-owned businesses designing the projects and getting them built.

“We are in the midst of three crises — public health, economic and a crisis when it comes to systemic racism. … To move us out of these crises, Chicago and Illinois should be at the forefront of moving from the rust belt to the green belt. Clean energy must become an engine of safety and stability in our communities.” 

Illinois energy bill proposes ‘green bank’ as national movement builds is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A recent op-ed by the Illinois Citizens Utility Board suggested that the Clean Energy Jobs Act (CEJA) is necessary to prevent unprecedented rate hikes in Illinois. The Illinois Chamber of Commerce has been concerned with that perspective for a variety of known reasons, most notably because it is a false narrative and not backed up by fact.

First, advocates continue to trot out this false $864 million dollar increase to our energy costs, despite the fact that they know, or should know, that this number is not real. It is based on an energy market proposal that federal energy regulators declined to accept and is therefore not even relevant to the circumstances we find ourselves in today.

More importantly, what CEJA advocates may not recognize about their bill, in addition to the sheer cost, is the severe threat to electric reliability that could result from its passage. Electric reliability is the guarantee that we can turn the lights on, watch Netflix, power our manufacturing sector, and allow for life-saving medical equipment to operate.  

If CEJA passes, it has the potential of shuttering Illinois’ nuclear fleet because the bill requires electricity prices to be reduced by five percent under today’s prices. That may sound great, but Exelon has made it clear that its nuclear plants are not profitable under today’s revenue levels and may retire those facilities.  If CEJA drops prices five percent, would Exelon have no choice but to close its nuclear plants? 

CEJA also mandates that all fossil fuel facilities must shutter by 2030, leaving Illinois in a situation with a majority of its generation gone due to CEJA. Ultimately, electricity must come from somewhere. The Illinois Chamber hopes that the Illinois General Assembly would not support a bill that results in our state having to import electricity and support jobs in Indiana and Kentucky just to keep the lights on at home.  Again, if CEJA passes, gone are Illinois’ high-paying jobs from those facilities that support local communities through a steady tax base and economic activity. 

When the companies that develop, finance, or operate electricity in Illinois are not included in drafting legislation, the realities of the industry and how the system operates are often missed.  Illinois needs to take another look at energy policy. The state can support the growth of lower emission energy resources while balancing the hit to ratepayer bills. CEJA is just not it.

We encourage the Illinois General Assembly to recognize that to be effective and impactful, technologies of all kinds play a role in the development of resources that can help lower emissions. Among them are renewable energy production, energy efficiency, battery storage solutions but also low-carbon technologies, carbon capture and sequestration, high-efficiency low-emission power plants, and others.

It will be largely up to the business community to develop, finance, build, and operate the solutions needed to power economic growth worldwide, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and build resilient, lower-carbon infrastructure. The Chamber encourages the Illinois General Assembly to recognize that the solutions and realities are much broader than what CEJA proposes.

There is much common ground on which all sides of this discussion can come together with policies that are practical, flexible, predictable, and durable. But it is imperative that policy approach also consider costs, benefits, and the competitiveness of the U.S. and Illinois economy.

Alex Messina is the executive director of the Energy Council at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce.

Commentary: Illinois clean energy bill risks reliability, raises costs on consumers is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Illinois must have been doing something right on clean energy for President Trump’s appointees to step in and try to stop it.

That’s exactly what they did late last year when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a ruling that would slam northern Illinois with up to $864 million a year in higher power bills. That could be the biggest electric increase in state history — bad news for the state’s consumers and businesses. But we have the ability to prevent it, with the Clean Energy Jobs Act.

What big “problem” were the Trump appointees trying to solve? It’s that our electric bills are too low. They said it themselves in the FERC order, complaining that state programs supporting cleaner forms of energy “are growing at a rapid pace” and “will increasingly have the ability to suppress … market prices.”

Lower market prices and more clean energy are not a bad thing. In fact, it’s good for the economy: Illinois’ clean energy workforce now employs more than 123,000 residents, nearly four times what the fossil fuel industry employs.

Also, thanks to the Future Energy Jobs Act, groundbreaking legislation passed in 2016, electricity prices have stayed down and energy efficiency programs have saved consumers hundreds of millions of dollars. (We’ve had the lowest average power bills in the Midwest for seven straight years).

But all that is threatened by this FERC ruling engineered by the White House. Its plan will artificially increase the prices we pay for what’s known as long-term “capacity” — by up to $864 million a year.

As the General Assembly and Gov. J.B. Pritzker work to increase renewable energy and decarbonize the electricity sector, electrify the transportation sector, and create clean energy jobs, reforming the capacity market must be included in this comprehensive effort.

Capacity payments are buried among the supply costs on our power bills. It’s what we pay big power generators for the promise to have enough electricity on hand when demand skyrockets, like on a steamy summer day. Illinois energy policy supports cleaner forms of electricity — but FERC’s ruling skews the rules to funnel more money to dirty and more expensive electricity.

In effect, Illinois consumers will be forced to pay for dirty power we don’t need — and that will have devastating consequences for consumers, businesses and the environment. But it’s not inevitable.

If Illinois passes the Clean Energy Jobs Act (CEJA), we can prevent the Trump rate hike and actually lower electricity bills from what we pay today.

Under CEJA, the Illinois Power Agency (IPA) would take on capacity planning. The IPA already handles the buying of electricity for ComEd customers and it has done an excellent job securing savings. CEJA simply gives the IPA the additional power to plan capacity so that we can affordably achieve 100 percent clean energy in Illinois.

Driving that message home, CEJA contains ironclad consumer protections that guarantee cost savings for ComEd customers over what we currently pay for electricity.

This FERC ruling is a challenge to Illinois from a president who has made no secret of his desire to bail out the coal industry. In his dissent of the ruling, FERC Commissioner Richard Glick confirmed that, describing the order as “a multi-billion-dollar-per-year rate hike” for electric customers in a dozen states, including Illinois.

“It’s a bailout, plain and simple,” he continued. “Today’s order serves one overarching purpose: To slow the transition to a clean energy future.”

We have a clear choice here in Illinois: We can take the power back and invest in clean, affordable energy. Or we can be bullied and pay more for dirty power we don’t need or want.

It’s time to fight back, take the power back, and pass the Clean Energy Jobs Act.

David Kolata is the executive director of the Illinois Citizens Utility Board.

Commentary: Illinois clean energy bill would prevent unprecedented rate hikes is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.