McKee's effort to slash green energy funding rebuffed
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
No more pencils, no more books, no more speaker’s dirty looks: lawmakers last week bid farewell to Smith Hill for the year Thursday night, when this year’s legislative session concluded.
It was a roller-coaster ride for environmental advocates, who spent most of the session playing defense. Gov. Dan McKee had proposed rolling back the renewable energy standard and slashing solar financing programs and energy efficiency initiatives as part of an affordability agenda to reduce electric and gas bills by any means necessary.
McKee wasn’t the only politician in New England proposing
cuts to such programs. Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House passed a bill in
February cutting $1 billion from their energy efficiency
programs, more commonly known as Mass Save.
But ultimately, in the version of the Rhode Island budget
signed into law by McKee on June 12, most of Rhode Island’s climate programs
will remain intact. The only changes will be to virtual net metering, which
will introduce a voluntary opt-in rate, and reduce the total cap of future
solar projects eligible for the program to just 175 megawatts.
Environmental advocates also notched another set of small
wins in the budget: the director of the state Department of Transportation was
removed as chair of the board of directors for the Rhode Island Public Transit
Authority, and lawmakers allocated the embattled transit agency with enough
funds to close its deficit.
Here’s some of what else lived, died or stalled:
First the big news: building decarbonization lives,
from a certain point of view.
Previous sessions saw lawmakers attempt to pass a single
bill that would require buildings in Rhode Island to track, benchmark, and
reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. That single bill always died in
committee, so this year advocates tried a more traditional tack, the
tried-and-true General Assembly two-step.
They spun off the more unpopular elements of building
benchmarking — the emission mandates — from the main bill that pushes large
buildings owners to start tracking emissions. Advocates acknowledged just
starting a benchmarking program for all buildings in the state would require
years of lead time to draw up regulations and spur adoption.
The two-step worked, and lawmakers passed H7813/S2260 in concurrence Thursday night. Starting in 2028,
property owners with buildings larger than 50,000 square feet will have to
track and report their emissions for the previous year. Buildings larger than
25,000 square feet start tracking in 2030.




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