House Democrats will make a push for new clean energy policies Wednesday, bringing forward a late-session bill overhauling how Massachusetts approves new power projects and seeking even more megawatts from green sources.
The House teed up a 97-page bill (H 4876) that largely mirrors a Senate-approved push to update the siting and permitting process, but expands into new procurement territory while leaving untouched some Senate plans like an update to the state’s bottle deposit law.
A spokesperson for House Speaker Ron Mariano confirmed the House will take up the bill in a formal session scheduled for Wednesday. If it wins approval, as expected, House and Senate Democrats would have two weeks of formal business left to iron out a compromise on a dense topic where one top senator is already voicing concerns about changes his counterpart made.
The “biggest piece” of the House bill, according to its chief architect, Rep. Jeff Roy, is the area with the most overlap between the branches: simplifying the process for selecting where new clean energy infrastructure will be built, and speeding up decisions on permits.
Roy said existing law does not set any hard deadlines for permitting clean energy projects, forcing some deliberations to stretch past 10 years as developers work to acquire an array of different approvals.
“If we are going to realistically get this infrastructure in place, it can’t take up to a decade to build these critical pieces of infrastructure,” he said in an interview.
The bill would consolidate state, regional and local permits for larger clean energy projects into a single permit issued by the Energy Facilities Siting Board. Decisions on those permits must be issued within 15 months of an application’s completion. Smaller project developers could also submit a similarly consolidated application, whose decision would be due within a year.
Utilities, energy generators and regulators largely agree that the existing process for siting and permitting new clean energy infrastructure is too complex and slow, especially as Massachusetts works to overhaul the grid to accommodate the clean energy resources needed to meet net-zero emissions requirements by 2050.
The Healey administration helped craft the siting and permitting reforms in the House and Senate bills with input from top lawmakers.
Roy said the new legislation supplements those changes with provisions seeking to boost the use of strategies like advanced metering and grid-enhancing technologies, or GETs.
“In an effort to meet our long-term emission reduction goals, the House will vote this week on legislation aimed at increasing our supply of clean energy by setting new renewable energy generation and storage procurement targets and streamlining the state and local permitting process, building on the work that the Legislature has done in recent years to modernize the Commonwealth’s energy grid and to combat the climate crisis,” Mariano said in a statement.
Other parts of the House bill have less in common with the version that senators approved 38-2 last month.
The House Ways and Means Committee bill, which was polled out on Tuesday, would call for a new procurement of 9.45 million megawatt-hours of clean energy, which could come from a variety of sources including existing nuclear generation. It also seeks procurement of 5,000 megawatts of energy storage, which Roy said will be necessary to keep the state powered from clean sources like solar and wind on days when the “sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.”
Neither of those measures feature in the Senate bill.
Caitlin Peale Sloan, vice president of the Conservation Law Foundation of Massachusetts, said she views the new 9.45 million megawatt-hour procurement as “essentially a re-up of 83D,” referring to an existing section of state law.
Peale Sloan said she is “disappointed” the House bill as drafted would effectively allow utility companies to pick winning bids for new clean energy, not the state Department of Energy Resources, returning to a previous status quo. “We lost a lot of time because of having the utilities in the driver’s seat under 83D,” she said.
The House bill also drops Senate-approved changes to the wind procurement process, and instead would task DOER with examining and recommending updates by the end of the year. Roy said he was “uncomfortable” with the language senators advanced, arguing that it “never had a hearing” where the public could offer feedback.
Peale Sloan said the eventual compromise bill will likely tackle “some tricky issues in the clean energy transition,” but forecast it will “still [be] the tip of the iceberg.” Environmental activists will continue to push lawmakers next term to focus on moving away from fossil fuels in building, heat and motor vehicles, she said.
Sen. Michael Barrett, the Senate’s point person on energy policy, said Tuesday morning that he was growing worried as he took a quick read of the House bill, saying that the House went “heavy on the business side and light on the consumer side.”
“There seem to be few consumer protections. This amounts to significant increases in the electric bill without any offsetting decreases on the gas bill. There’s nothing that would prevent more 30-year gas pipe from going into the ground; we’ll be paying for that forever,” he said. “Siting and permitting means big bucks for the utilities and big bills for the rest of us. You don’t want to just do that and call it a day.”
Barrett said when the Senate passed its energy and climate bill in May that Massachusetts can’t avoid paying to upgrade the grid to handle more renewable energy and that the Senate bill’s provisions altering gas system investment programs and curtailing some expansions are key to keeping overall energy costs from skyrocketing for residents.
“You can safely cut back on gas and spare people having to pay for infrastructure that’s going to require higher bills for 30 years on the gas side. You can pare back on gas as you beef up on electric … but without the trade this becomes a big headache for household budgets,” he said.
The Lexington Democrat has for years been warning that focusing on electrification without corresponding relief for ratepayers could turn residents against clean energy policy, especially given the state’s already high electricity prices. He said Tuesday that that danger “becomes worse as Trump becomes stronger.”
But despite his concerns, Barrett said he believes an accord is still on the table.
“The House is acting very late, which complicates things, but I think there’s a shot here,” Barrett said. “We’d have to meet in person and knock this out section by section. You’re talking about a marathon, but I think we can do it.”
Roy said he’s “confident” that he and Barrett can hash out a compromise bill quickly with the July 31 end of formal sessions approaching.