Bill proposal puts a target on expired renewable energy requirement

Jack, who is also the chief operating officer at Dixie Power, said the electric cooperative had never followed the requirement since “renewable energy on the market was always more expensive than our regular energy portfolio.” However, he was still required to present regular reports on the utility’s energy portfolio.

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“I foolishly assumed then that the section of code just kind of evaporated and went away. Turns out it doesn’t work that way. We have to have a bill to repeal laws as we get finished with them,” Jack told the Public Utilities, Energy, and Technology Interim Committee on Wednesday. 

But, that move has a little more nuance than a regular legislative proposal to undo expired code. 

“We always had the caveat in this law that said it was subject to economic viability, but by repealing it, it could prevent some future group, our successors, from maybe making it a mandate, repealing the sentence about economic viability,” Jack said, “and we may be preventing future rate increases by our successors.”

Making the renewables provision an absolute requirement would be expensive for ratepayers, Jack said. Because of the way the law was written, it didn’t have that effect while it was in place. But, electricity providers “were forced to look at it each year to evaluate what we had bought and to evaluate what we might have bought.”

While Democratic lawmakers had questions about whether this legislation would undermine the procurement of more renewable resources, the full committee ended up voting unanimously to advance the bill, giving it a faster path to approval next year.

“We as a state, not everybody is in agreement that we should disenfranchise renewable energy necessarily and I’m not sure if that’s exactly what this bill addresses, but I just wanted to state that,” Murray Democratic Rep. Rosalba Dominguez said during the discussion.

Utilities had been drafting cost-benefit analyses before the original law passed in 2008, Jack said, and he’s confident the practice will remain moving forward. 

“It will just give them more surety that this report is finished as it currently stands in code,” he said.

Representatives from associations representing rural cooperatives, municipal power systems and Rocky Mountain Power, the largest commercial utility in the state, spoke in favor of the draft, saying it would help ensure that customers can turn their lights on when they need them, and that at the end of the month, they can afford to pay their utility bill. 

Energy cooperatives supporting the repeal had taken issue with the law because it prescribes a specific type of fuel, when the state’s recently established energy policy is “agnostic to fuel types,” said Nathaniel Johnson, executive director of the Utah Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

“Repealing this would make it so that the state energy policy, that again, that is agnostic, allows for market-driven solutions, not a mandate on a specific fuel source,” Johnson said.

Thom Carter, vice president of government affairs at Rocky Mountain Power said the legislation “may not necessarily change how we do business because, at the end of the day, as the sponsor has indicated, it is about affordable, reliable, and safe.”

“And because this has always talked about putting the economics first, we are going to put the economics first,” Carter said. “And ensure that people have the ability to pay their bill, or more importantly, keep their lights on.”

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