Climate change bill passes Washington state House

 

Apr 13 - McClatchy-Tribune Business News Formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Kathie Durbin The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.

 

On a bipartisan 84-14 vote, the House of Representatives passed a climate change bill late Thursday that offers incentives to utilities for reducing their carbon emissions while keeping alive plans for a coal gasification plant in Kalama.

Speakers on both sides of the aisle praised the bill, calling it fair and equitable both to utilities and to ratepayers.

Negotiations over the final version continued late into the evening as lobbyists for utilities and environmental groups huddled outside the House chamber, reviewing last-minute amendments. The changes were negotiated by Sen. Erik Poulsen, D-Seattle, and Rep. Jeff Morris, D-Mt. Vernon.

At the same time, he said, it would allow a coal gasification plant that is on the drawing boards to go ahead. Under its language, if investor-owned utility Energy Northwest discovered after five years that it could not permanently inject carbon emissions from the plant into rock, a process called carbon sequestration, it would be allowed to buy carbon credits to offset those emissions.

The bill defers many decisions on how to attain greenhouse gas emission reductions to Gov. Chris Gregoire's Climate Action Team, a 21-member task force that held its first meeting in late March. For example, it asks Gregoire to recommend how regulatory and tax policies could help utilities achieve strict new emissions goals.

The original Senate bill, prime-sponsored by Sen. Craig Pridemore, D-Vancouver, set a strict limit on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel-burning electric plants that a traditional coal-fired plant could not meet.

That limit of 1,100 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt-hour is still in the bill, but utilities would have to comply with it only after they enter into a new long-term financial commitment, such as a contract to purchase energy or to build a new plant.

Morris, chairman of the House Technology, Energy and Communications Committee, rewrote the original Senate bill to allow utilities to meet the standard through carbon offsets. The House Appropriations Committee restored the bill's original language. Negotiations to find a middle ground have been underway for two weeks.

Environmentalists and utility representatives expressed general satisfaction with the final form of the bill.

The bill gets rid of an incentive would have allowed investor-owned utilities to grant an additional 2 percent rate of return to shareholders to reward them for energy efficiencies.

It asks the governor to develop recommendations for developing a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions and a process for replacing the state's worst polluting power plants with newer technology.

It says facilities that use renewable sources of energy, including wood byproducts, automatically comply with the new performance standard.

And it requires all electricity generating plants built in Washington after June 30, 2008, to meet the standard even if they don't sell the electricity to Washington customers.