From state Senator Craig Wilcox:

The RPS, or Renewable Portfolio Standards, collects a fee from every ComEd and Ameren customer bill and is deposited into the Renewable Portfolio Fund.

This bill doubles that fee to Subsidize renewables, but we didn’t change any of the RPS standards for credits, despite many known limitations and outright problems with the program after FEJA enacted it years ago.

We will still pay out based on installer estimates of production for solar arrays versus paying based
on validated production output.

This component of the bill costs ratepayers $360 million per year, adding up to $3.6 billion over the next ten years.

Will the benefits of the program outweigh that sizeable cost?

Specifically, will the investment in renewables:

1) lower our carbon footprint

2) sustain our electricity needs
and

3) help our struggling small businesses and families, or will we be back here in a few years
from now asking for more rate hikes because this energy bill is shortsighted?

FEJA never came close to producing enough renewable energy to meet the goals, and we significantly overpaid for it.

We are on track to overpay again, and maybe put IL into a similar position that Europe is seeing now, skyrocketing energy prices when the renewables fail to produce as designed

While this bill fixes the solar cliff, ComEd has been rebating $1 million per day since the deadline passed, that rebating stops as soon as this bill is signed.

Will this be a case of some people getting a rebate and others not?

Will those who got rebates have to pay that money back?

We’ve also seen so many scandals under this dome with ethical standards being a constant problem, yet apparently we can’t find it in us to put ethical standards in place for wind and solar industries

What makes them above ethics requirements and reporting?

We had an opportunity to increase ethical standards for all of our energy companies that have proved to have such problems and remove legislators from the ratemaking process all together.

Yet this bill continues the ICC status quo and picks and chooses what companies need to follow ethical rules and requirements.

We also made no attempt to place carbon footprint goals on the production processes that occur all over the world to allow wind and solar to be installed in IL.

No discussion of the carbon footprint in the creation of renewable energy equipment, no discussion of strip-mining for Lithium, but we continue to push for Electrical Vehicles.

This was our chance to really change the way we work with utilities in Illinois.

We could have improved the process, made it stronger and more transparent, more ethical, and acknowledged the need to get greener deeper than just in IL, but that would have required more work and
apparently was not in the cards this time around.

Most importantly, we could have taken legislators out of the game all together, but instead, here we are, with another bailout bill that is going to be the greatest energy increase in Illinois history.

I urge a NO vote.

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Here is the Senstr Roll Call:

The House Roll Call can be found here.