MARYLAND (WBFF) — On the last day of session, lawmakers passed the Utility RELIEF Act, a major piece of energy legislation, aimed to address energy affordability in the state. However, many Republican lawmakers have pushed back, arguing it won’t bring meaningful relief.
The lengthy bill aims to lower energy costs at least $150 a year, largely through changes to EmPOWER Maryland, an energy efficiency program. The bill also sets out to strengthen the grid, allocates funding for clean energy projects, ensures data centers cover the cost for their impact to the grid, removes an incentive for utility companies joining regional transmission organizations, and limits how much money from ratepayers can be used to fund high utility employee salaries. The bill also makes changes to how utility rates will be set, preventing utility companies from filing reconciliation requests that would impose additional charges on Marylanders.
“We are accelerating and funding the limited income mechanism set up in statute to cap monthly bills for our most vulnerable Marylanders,” Senate President Bill Ferguson said. “That program has the potential to save eligible Marylanders up to $1,400, $1,400 a year, depending on their utility service territory.”
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While the bill now heads to Governor Wes Moore‘s desk to be signed into law, Republicans have argued that the bill does not provide enough of a cost savings.
“They’ve taken 90 days to push through a policy that does very little for ratepayers. They should be ashamed of themselves, actually,” Senate Minority Leader Stephen Hershey said. “We have some great ideas, a lot of ideas that came through from the Republican Caucuses that would have provided substantial savings to ratepayers in Maryland, and they neglected all of them. And so now they’re coming back, and they’re going to say, what are we going to save, $12.50 a month? That’s what they’ve come up with after 90 days. It’s embarrassing to be honest.”
“We still haven’t solved the supply problem,” Del. Brian Chisholm said in part during a debate on the House floor.
While the $150 estimate is front and center, during Monday’s debate, lawmakers supporting the legislation said it was hard to quantify other cost saving-measures included in the bill.
“No one can sit here today and tell us how much our ratepayers are going to save from having more generation in the state of Maryland, as this bill will bring about. No one can sit here today and tell us how much ratepayer savings this bill will bring, even though it will, from changes to the large load tariff and many, many other, provisions to address the short, medium and long term challenges,” Del. Marc Korman, the Chair of the Environment and Transportation Committee, said.
“There may be more savings in the future, I know some of them we can’t pencil out right now. But when we talk about the $12.50 that it is in the bill right now, people have gotten downright just nasty and angry at my community associations. They think that that is nowhere near enough,” Del. Ryan Nawrocki said.
“This bill is going to reduce your constituents costs,” Del. David Fraser-Hidalgo said. “Can we control everything? No. As we’ve talked about, most of the costs come from the PJM and capacity auctions. That is a fact. These are facts. So what does this bill does, it addresses the things that we and the State of Maryland have the ability and the power to do, and it addresses them in an extraordinarily aggressive manner.”
While lawmakers on both sides of the aisle certainly don’t see eye-to-eye on the legislation, political expert John Dedie said it “was an election year bill.”
“This is kind of like a sugar high, temporary thing for people to say, hey, look, you’ve saved this money,” Dedie said. “But people open up those bills every month as they’re only getting higher, because summer is going to come and people are going to want to be cool, and air conditioning is only going to cause more angst and anxiety among people saying, you know, what do we do now that deal with these costs?
“I think most consumers, they’re not going to even notice the $150 over the course of the year, because of the fact that rates increase so high,” he added.
A statement from BGE, Delmarva Power and Pepco read in part, “The Utility RELIEF Act includes several meaningful steps that will help customers in the near term, including expanded access to energy assistance, a continued focus on affordability by ensuring large-load customers pay their fair share of grid modernization costs, and increased financial support for limited-income households by accelerating and funding a discounted rate mechanism BGE, Delmarva Power, and Pepco were instrumental in developing. These are important tools that can make a real difference for customers who need it most, and we are committed to helping connect eligible customers with every available resource.”
“At the same time, it is important to ensure that well-intended policies do not create unintended consequences for customers over the long term. Policies that limit how utilities plan, invest, and recover costs can make it more challenging to maintain the safe, reliable energy system that customers depend on every day and may ultimately increase costs or delay critical infrastructure investments,” the statement continued to read.
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