Illinois' brilliant new climate, jobs, and justice bill

In 2016, Illinois passed a decent enough energy bill. It shored up the state’s (relatively modest) renewable energy standard and kept its existing nuclear power plants open. It was a compromise among varied interests, signed into law by a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor. At the time, I figured it was the best any state in the coal-heavy Midwest was likely to do.

Well, that will teach me to go around figuring. Just five years later, Illinois has raised the bar, passing one of the most environmentally ambitious, worker-friendly, justice-focused energy bills of any state in the country: The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act.

Illinois is now the first state in the Midwest to commit to net-zero carbon emissions, joining over a dozen other states across the country. It is also a model for how diverse stakeholders can reach consensus.

What’s changed in Illinois

A great deal has changed since that 2016 bill was passed.

First and foremost, in 2018, Democrats gained a trifecta in state government, increasing their lead in both houses of the Illinois General Assembly and putting Democrat J.B. Pritzker in the governor’s office. As I have emphasized numerous times now, Democratic control is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for ambitious state energy policy.

Soon after the 2018 election, negotiations over a new energy bill began in earnest.

The state’s labor community was sensitive to the fact that it had largely been left out of the 2016 bill; the legislation contained no labor standards, and recent years have seen Illinois renewable energy projects importing cheaper out-of-state workforces. Labor didn’t want to get left behind in the state’s energy transition, so it organized a coalition of groups under the banner Climate Jobs Illinois and set about playing an active role in negotiations.

Renewable energy developers — cognizant of the fact that Illinois is falling short of its renewable energy goals (it’s at 9 percent; it’s supposed to be at 21) and state funding has dried up for new renewable energy projects — organized as Path to 100.

Environmental and climate-justice groups organized as the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition.

All the groups introduced energy bills of their own. And then they spent years banging their heads together.

But there was another key difference: this time around, utilities were not at the table.

Exelon subsidiary ComEd had been caught up in a bribery scandal that left it disempowered and weak, under a deferred prosecution agreement. The scandal also led to House Speaker Michael Madigan, a reliable utility ally, being removed from his position.

Utilities were, to put it crudely, on the s**t list, allowing political leadership to restrain their historic (and largely counterproductive) influence.

Nonetheless, by all accounts, negotiations were difficult; the bill was declared dead several times. Senate President Don Harmon (D) said several times that it is the single most complex piece of legislation he’d ever worked on. There were uncertainties and impasses right up through the final week.

But they got it done! It passed with bipartisan supermajorities: 83-33 in the House and 37-17 in the Senate. Pritzker signed it on September 15.

One crucial piece of the puzzle was new political leadership, from Pritzker on down. Harmon, who became Senate president in 2018, is a longtime champion of renewable energy. In January 2021, Rep. Chris Welch, a widely respected deal-maker, replaced Madigan as House Speaker. Welch pursued what his office calls “distributed, collective leadership” — key members of the House Democratic leadership took responsibility for acting as liaisons to the legislature’s Black caucus, the environmental community, and coal communities.

By all accounts, everyone performed their roles ably, holding an unwieldy coalition together through choppy waters. Illinois politics reporter Rich Miller has a nice rundown of the final passage, which he calls “a spectacular victory.”

From the beginning, everyone involved was more or less aligned around rapid growth of renewable energy and full decarbonization of the electricity sector by 2045.

The most contentious issue proved to be the schedule for decarbonization. The environmentalists in the Clean Jobs Coalition wanted steady 20 percent reductions every five years, starting in 2026. The labor groups in Climate Jobs Illinois were worried that shutting down fossil fuel plants that fast would lead to the state being forced to import fossil fuel power from out of state, sacrificing jobs to no environmental gain.

Particularly thorny was a municipally owned coal plant, the 10-year-old Prairie State Energy Campus in southwestern Illinois, which is the state’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and a horrendous financial boondoggle that costs more to run than its power is worth.

Part of the problem is that the plant, owned by a consortium of nine public power agencies, was largely funded by municipal bonds from the communities meant to receive its power; those communities were worried they’d get stiffed if the plant retired early. (Enviros claimed they could close the plant, use the savings to pay off the bonds, and still come out ahead, but that was met with some skepticism.)

To make a long story short: first Pritzker wanted the plant’s retirement date at 2035. Then he agree to 2045. Then Senate Democrats voted through a plan that would have let the plant pump out 100 percent of its current emissions through 2045. That was unacceptable to environmentalists and Pritzker, who wanted interim reduction targets. That