Clean energy activists turn focus
to Northwest state legislatures
Energy is on lawmakers’ minds as 2007 legislative sessions progress in all four Northwest states.
Encouraged by ballot approval of Washington state’s clean energy initiative, I-937, Oregon activists are pressing for passage of Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s 25-percent renewable energy standard.
Montana’s legislature passed its own renewables standard last year, requiring investor-owned utilities to get 15 percent of their energy from renewables by 2015. Now, clean-energy advocates want legislators to further that goal by helping small business and residential customers invest in renewable energy systems. The state also needs to improve energy efficiency incentives.
In Idaho, NW Energy Coalition and its allies are pushing for provisions in the new proposed state energy plan that will move Idaho closer to meeting its share of the region’s energy efficiency targets, as well as provide additional tax and other incentives for clean energy development.
And back in Washington, I-937 backers are closely monitoring the legislature for any attempts to weaken or circumvent the initiative’s mandates.
On the coal front …
Coal is a hotly contested issue throughout the region. Montana lies at the epicenter of that debate, with bills to give coal developers tax incentives and reduced regulations, on the one hand, and bills aimed at making coal plants reduce health-damaging emissions and control greenhouse gases.
Idaho was the site of two tremendous victories in 2006: a two-year moratorium on merchant coal-plant construction (which sent Sempra Energy and its proposed southern Idaho coal plant packing) and a decision to opt out of the federal mercury pollution-trading scheme. Both dealt telling blows to potential coal developers in still coal-plant-free Gem State.
The moratorium probably won’t be extended. NW Energy Coalition and its Idaho allies are working to achieve the same end by protecting the mercury rule opt-out. Without mercury credits, no potential developer could build a coal plant in Idaho.
Oregon’s Fair and Clean Energy Coalition is calling for a “stand down on coal” -- a bill, similar to one recently passed in California, prohibiting utilities from importing power or owning a new power resource that emits more climate-changing carbon dioxide than an efficient natural gas-fired plant. Because coal-burning releases roughly twice the CO2 that natural gas does, no coal plant can meet such a requirement, unless it captures and sequesters (permanently stores) its CO2 emissions – something not even the region’s proposed coal-gasification plants would do (or, at this point, could do).
Washington state also will consider such a ban, known by insiders as a “plant performance standard.” The NW Energy Coalition and member organizations also want the legislature to amend the state’s 2-year-old CO2 mitigation standard – designed with gas plants in mind -- to address the far greater emissions of coal-fueled power plants.
For more information on legislative efforts in individual Northwest states, click on the links in the left column.
