The Illinois House will reconvene to consider a comprehensive energy proposal on Thursday, four days before Commonwealth Edison parent Exelon has said it will shut down one of its five state nuclear power plants if a bill with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies isn’t passed.
House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch said negotiations on an energy plan have been ongoing and expressed optimism that a long-discussed energy bill will be approved.
“I am confident that we will have a plan that Illinois can be proud of and will be viewed as a model for many other states,” Welch said in a statement.
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch speaks to the media after being elected on Jan. 13, 2021, in Springfield. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Chicago Tribune)
During a one-day session that began Aug. 31 and stretched into the next day, the Illinois Senate approved an energy policy overhaul that includes a nearly $700 million bailout for Exelon’s nuclear plants. But the House had already adjourned by the time the early morning vote was taken.
The Senate proposal aims to put the state on a path to 100% carbon-free power by 2050, but it did not have the support of Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
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A House plan introduced over the weekend has Pritzker’s support, but it’s unclear whether it would have enough votes in the Senate — which would have to reconvene to take up any legislation passed by the House — to make it to the governor’s desk.
The House version improves on the Senate’s proposal “by requiring a 100 percent reduction in carbon emissions for municipal coal by 2045 with the additional goal of reducing emissions by 45 percent by 2035,” Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in a statement.
“We know our planet cannot afford to wait more than two decades before significant progress at reducing carbon emissions is made, and this bill is a reasonable path forward,” Abudayyeh said. “The administration looks forward to continuing discussions with our partners in the House.”
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The key issue in getting an energy package done has been the process for shutting down the Prairie State Generating Station in southern Illinois, a coal-fired plant that serves municipalities across Illinois. The Senate plan would shut down the plant by 2045 — 15 years after most other coal plants would have to close and the same year as natural gas plants would have to be shuttered.
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Pritzker and environmental group allies want a requirement that the Prairie State plant — the largest source of industrial carbon pollution in Illinois and one of the largest in the country — reduce its climate-changing emissions in the intervening 24 years.
Exelon has long threatened to close two nuclear plants if it doesn’t get enough money out of the state energy package, and after the Senate vote the company gave a Sept. 13 deadline for shutting down its plant in Byron, Illinois. Exelon said it would close its plant in Dresden in November. A third plant that would receive subsidies, in Braidwood, isn’t threatened with being shut down.
Exelon says subsidies tacked onto customers’ bills are necessary to compete without cheaper, dirtier fossil fuels and subsidized renewable energy sources
Legislators largely agree on bailing out three of Exelon’s nuclear plants with money from utility customers. The company warned lawmakers in the summer of 2020, shortly after ComEd admitted in federal court that it engaged in a yearslong bribery scheme aimed at advancing its agenda in Springfield, that it would shut down its Byron and Dresden nuclear plants this year without additional help from the state.
The plants provide many well-paying union jobs and the threatened shutdown has made organized labor, another key constituency of the Democrats who control state government, central to negotiations over the energy proposal.
dpetrella@chicagotribune.com
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