House Prepares Utility Bill

As reported we reported in Sgt. Joe Friday: Just the Facts, SB564 Grid Modernization, the Senate had passed a bill providing for accelerated grid modernization. The blog post contains the actual parts of the bill and dispels many false statements being made about what it does or does not do. We have always maintained there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with the bill but do so with the facts!

Now, the House has adopted it’s own version of grid modernization. Rather than re-invent the wheel, they started with Senate Bill (SB) 564 as it had been negotiated over several long hours in the Senate. They made their own modifications  to the bill coming up with House Committee Substitute (HCS) for House Bill (HB) 2265.

Here is HCS HB2265 as it was passed through the committee. This is a searchable, annotated copy of the bill outlining the changes the House made.  You can find a searchable, annotated copy of SB564 by clicking here.

A summary of those changes are:

• 386.266 – The House language allows the costs of decoupling to be spread out across all customer classes. (This provision is for Empire Electric as it is anticipated that they will not choose to use Plant In-Service Accounting (PISA) provisions of the bill. No utility can decouple and do PISA.)
• 393.137 –  The House added language that reiterates Ameren must implement the rate rollback attributed to the federal tax cut within 90 days of passage.
• 393.1100 – The House added language specifying that utilities must offer smart meter opt-out. It is limited to only 2% of customers of each utility statewide.
• 393.1400 – The House language changes depreciation allowed by utilities using PISA to 100% after bill is passed and 50% prior to passage. Senate bill has 85% allowed.
• 393.1665 –  The House deleted the section requiring a specified amount of utility solar projects. The effort is still required under current statute but would no longer be quantified in the utility bill.

The House Utilities Committee is scheduled to hear SB564  on Wednesday, March 14, 2018.

#gridmodernization
#2018