Word came from renewable energy advocates early this morning that Rep. Tim Neese (R-Elkhart), Chairman of the House Local Government Committee and author of HB 1457 regarding creation of clean energy improvement financing districts, is planning to offer a strip and insert amendment to turn his Indiana PACE bill into a study committee.
Watch here for details!
Posting Time: 02/15/2011 05:30 PM
Agenda for : House Local Government Committee
DATE: Thursday, February 17, 2011
TIME: 8:00 AM EST
PLACE: Room 156-B, State House, Indianapolis, IN
Chairman : Rep. Tim Neese (R-Elkhart) h48@in.gov or (317) 232-9677
Vice-Chair : Rep. Kathy Heuer (R-Columbia City) h83@in.gov or (317) 232-9647
Members :
Rep. Bruce Borders (R-Jasonville) h54@in.gov or (317) 232-9678
Rep. Sean Eberhart (R-Shelbyville) h57@in.gov or (317) 234-9499
Rep. Phil Hinkle (R-Indianapolis) h92@in.gov or (317) 234-3827
Rep. Rhonda Rhoads (R-Corydon) h70@in.gov or (317) 232-9619
Rep. Tom Saunders (R-Lewisville) h54@in.gov or (317) 232-9677
Rep. Heath VanNatter (R-Kokomo) h38@in.gov or (317) 232-9647
Rep. Vernon Smith R.M.M. (D-Gary) h14@in.gov or (317) 232-9875
Rep. John Day (D-Indianapolis) h100@in.gov or (317) 232-9976
Rep. Nancy Dembowski (D-Knox) h17@in.gov or (317) 234-9012
Rep. Win Moses, Jr. (D-Ft. Wayne) h81@in.gov or (317) 232-9999
Rep. Cherrish Pryor (D-Indianapolis) h94@in.gov or (317) 234-9047
HB 1507 - Reconsideration
HB 1275 - Has been added to bill list
Hearing : (Authors 1st, Co-Author)
HB 1507 Floyd County park district. (Clere)
HB 1457 Clean energy improvement financing district.( Neese, Sullivan)
DIGEST OF INTRODUCED BILL: Clean energy improvement financing district. Allows the legislative body of a political subdivision (other than a township) to establish a clean energy improvement financing district for the purpose of issuing bonds to fund clean energy improvements for voluntary participants in the program. Provides that the bond proceeds are used to pay all costs associated with the improvements and that assessments are imposed only on participating property owners to repay the bonds. Establishes a 20 year period for bond repayment and for the payment of assessments on each property. Provides that assessments are billed, collected, and enforced in the same manner as property taxes.
HB 1543 Regulation of residential leases.(Speedy Turner)
HB 1252 CEDIT for Perry County jail. (Ellspermann Davisson)
HB 1275 Local transfers between funds. (Saunders)
A similar bill, SB 260, was introduced in the Indiana State Senate and heard in the Senate Utilities and Technology Committee earlier this month. SB 260 was amended to prohibit municipal bonds to finance this proposed program. SB 260 is currently on the Second Reading calendar in the Indiana Senate tomorrow (2/17/2011) and therefore, is available for amendments to be offered on the floor of the Senate. The Senate goes into session 2/17/2011 at 1:30 pm.
Editor's Note: For more information about this bill visit: SB 72.
To see how your State Senator voted on SB 72: Roll Call 0089.PDF_SB 72 defeated 21-28
7:10 AM, Feb. 14, 2011
Indiana's Senate has handed Gov. Mitch Daniels a setback on the big coal gasification plant he wants to see built at Rockport.
Senators rejected a measure that would have cleared the way for a special pipeline sought by investors to move carbon dioxide away from the southwestern Indiana plant to buyers on the Gulf Coast.
The vote last week marked an unusual defeat for the Republican governor, whose party dominates the Senate.
The bill's Republican sponsor, Sen. Beverly Gard of Greenfield, said some lawmakers who voted against the bill didn't understand its significance.
Without legislation allowing eminent domain for such pipelines, lead investor Leucadia National Corp. doubts it could secure the federal guarantees on construction loans for the $2.6 billion gasification plant it has proposed at Rockport.
This week, the top Leucadia official in Indiana, Mark Lubbers, once a chief adviser to Daniels, is expected to confer with company and legislative leaders about bringing the eminent domain measure back to the General Assembly.
Backers were stunned when the bill failed Tuesday on a vote of 28-21, with 16 of the chamber's 37 Republicans opposed.
The defeat is considered a setback for investors and a coal industry counting on a grand energy strategy backed by some of the wealthiest names in American finance, including Goldman Sachs and General Electric Financial.
Plans call for rendering millions of tons of sulfurous Midwestern coal into natural gas, using GE gasifiers in some of the proposed plants in Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.
Linking those gasification plants would be a seamless pipeline. The resulting carbon dioxide waste would flow across half a dozen states to the Mississippi storage caverns of Denbury Resources.
The Texas-based company sells tons of C02, as the waste is called, to gas drillers probing under the Gulf of Mexico.
Indiana would be a key part of the circuit. Carbon dioxide from Tenaska Corp.'s proposed plant in Taylorville, Ill., would run to Rockport and then to Erora Group's proposed Cash Creek plant in western Kentucky, reports the trade journal Midwest Energy News.
The Illinois and Kentucky pipelines have not been built. The Rockport project is further along. But the absence of a pipeline could scuttle it.
"If the governor's office wants this, it's going to have to figure out what to do next," said Gard, sponsor of defeated Senate Bill 72.
"I had no warning 72 was going to go down," Gard said. "This whole deal was brokered by the governor. The Democrats have a problem with that. And the ultra-conservatives don't like anything that says eminent domain."
The term refers to an entity such as the state taking away private land, for a price, for use in what it deems to be a larger good, such as roadways.
"Eminent domain, that's the part that bothered me," said Sen. Allen Paul, R-Richmond. "I don't think it's right you go on someone's property and take it."
Democrats contend the measure was poorly explained, particularly by Denbury representatives.
"I felt like we were being sold a bill of goods without an explanation of why they wanted it," said Sen. Karen Tallian, D-Portage.
A member of the Energy and Environmental Affairs Committee, where Senate Bill 72 originated, Tallian said Denbury, a pipeline operator, wanted eminent domain asserted almost anywhere in the state it chose to run a pipeline.
But the company never gave her a satisfactory reason for why it had no specific route or needed statewide rights, she said.
Nor was there a reason the bill would have handed Indiana's Department of Natural Resources responsibility for eminent domain involving carbon dioxide pipelines, Tallian said. Present laws rest that responsibility with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
"There is an authority in the state who oversees pipelines. That's IURC. This bill went around that and gave it to DNR," Tallian said. "Why we needed all these strange, out-of-the-normal patterns, I don't know."
With the measure killed in the Senate, Leucadia consultant William Rosenberg said Lubbers and officials from Denbury and Leucadia will have to find a way to bring the matter up again.
Lubbers could not immediately be reached for comment.
Rosenberg, of E3 Gasification in Cary, N.C., called the measure essential. Loan guarantees from federal officials are unlikely if no plan is in place for keeping the carbon dioxide -- a greenhouse gas -- out of the air.
"I think this is the cleanest and most environmentally sound project ever proposed" using coal, said Rosenberg, a former energy adviser to President George H.W. Bush. "But the project cannot be built without this pipeline. We're going to have to go back to the legislature and discuss this with the people."
Although Daniels is widely considered a key supporter of the Rockport project, an aide to the governor declined to weigh in on the bill's defeat.
"We don't have a position on this bill," said Jane Jankowski, Daniels' spokeswoman.
In defeating the measure, the Senate handed Leucadia its second setback since the Rockport plant was proposed in 2006.
Back then, Indiana gas utilities and industrial users of gas refused to buy any of the Rockport gas, saying ample supplies were available on the open market.
When the project was collapsing, Daniels shored it up in 2008. His initiative would put the state in the natural gas business. That controversial plan is now being considered by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
Under the plan, the Indiana Finance Authority, a state agency, would buy almost all the Rockport gas at a wholesale price of about $6 per million BTU and resell it on the open market.
If the market price is below $6, the loss would be passed to Indiana's 1 million gas-burning households in the form of higher natural gas bills. If the gas sells for more than $6, the finance authority would split the profits with Leucadia's subsidiary, Indiana Gasification LLC.
The state's share of the profits would be used to lower the residential gas bills across Indiana. Estimates place the household savings at about $100 per year in the event gas prices, now about $800 per year for the typical home, rise to $2,000.
Daniels favors the plan, saying gas prices are destined to rise nationwide, and the 3.2 million tons of coal consumed by Rockport each year would support about 200 mining jobs, which in turn could help revitalize southwest Indiana.
Federal incentives have encouraged plants that gasify coal into liquid fuel. Across the nation, investors and utilities proposed 31 such projects in the past few years. Of those, 12 are under discussion by regulators in various states, eight are producing or under construction, and 11 have been canceled, chiefly because of costs, according to a Sierra Club review of federal reports.
Leucadia, run by two of America's wealthiest men, Ian Cumming and Joseph Steinberg, brought in Rosenberg as a consultant to look at the gasification proposal for Indiana. He had worked with Lubbers in the late 1980s in Indiana as a consultant for another company.
At that time, Lubbers advised then-Gov. Robert Orr on scrapping the Marble Hill nuclear plant. This time around, Rosenberg figured Indiana was ready to proceed on Rockport and the eminent domain measure.
"It was assumed the votes were there," Rosenberg said. "It was a surprise to us when it wasn't."
Call Star reporter Ted Evanoff at (317) 444-6019
Leucadia National Corp.
What: New York-based diversified holding company engaged in various businesses, including manufacturing, telecommunications and land-based contract oil and gas drilling.
2009 revenues: $1.1.billion.
President: Joseph S. Steinberg.
Employees: More than 3,000.
Indiana Gasification
What: Formed by Leucadia to run the Indiana coal-gasification plant at Rockport.
Developers: E3 Gasification and Johnston Development Co.
Leadership: William Rosenberg is president of Cary, N.C.-based E3 Gasification and a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Energy Administration administrator, as well as former chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana is chairman of Johnston Development. He is a former U.S. senator and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Sources: Company report, Evansville Courier & Press
Despite strong opposition from environmentalists, senior citizens and consumer groups, an Indiana Senate committee on Thursday endorsed legislation that encourages the construction of coal-fired and nuclear power plants in Indiana and would allow utilities to quickly recover certain costs from customers.
The wide-ranging measure, supported by major utilities across Indiana, passed the Senate Utilities and Technology Committee along party lines after three hours of heated discussion. Six Republicans, including Chairman Jim Merritt of Indianapolis, voted in favor, and two Democrats voted against. The bill now moves to the full Senate for consideration.
"Our energy needs are growing," said Sen. Brandt Hershman, R-Lafayette, one of the bill's authors. "We need to develop a comprehensive policy to address this challenge."
More than a dozen organizations showed up to oppose the measure, including environmentalists, large industrial customers, wind power advocates, the AARP and consumer groups.
Many said the bill would raise the cost of electricity to customers and would shift the risk of building traditional power plants from the utility companies to customers. They also said Senate Bill 251 would give incentives to utilities to do what they are already doing: investing in coal plants at the expense of renewable-energy projects such as wind, solar, biomass and water.
"You are rolling out the red carpet for nuclear power and coal and telling real renewable-energy resources to use the back door," said Laura Ann Arnold of Indiana Distributed Energy Advocates, a promoter of renewable energy.
The Indiana Cast Metals Association, which represents foundries across the state, said the bill allows too many "trackers," or mechanisms that allow utilities to automatically pass along the cost of federal mandates without sufficient oversight from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
"Energy costs are a top concern of our members," said Blake Jeffery, the association's executive director.
But some Republicans said the bill would help provide reliable electricity for all Hoosiers.
"You want power. It's not going to fall out of the sky for free," responded Sen. Beverly Gard, R-Greenfield, one of the bill's authors.
Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a grass-roots consumer group with 40,000 members, denounced the bill, saying it would reduce financial risk for utilities while increasing their profits. A section of the bill would provide up to 3.5 percent more return on investment to utilities that meet certain renewable-energy requirements.
"When are we going to talk about the consumer, and about protecting the public?" said Kerwin Olson, program director at Citizens Action.
"You are merely shifting the risk to ratepayers," said Jack Wickes, an attorney at Lewis & Kappes, which represents dozens of large industrial consumers of electricity.
The Sierra Club's Hoosier chapter said the bill would take Indiana's energy policy in the wrong direction, encouraging traditional power plants at the expense of cleaner, renewable options.
"What you are doing is incentivizing business as usual," said Mike Mullet with the Sierra Club.
The bill also would provide incentives to build nuclear power plants in Indiana. There are no nuclear plants in the state, and the last one that was approved, Marble Hill in Southern Indiana, was abandoned during construction in the 1980s after running into huge cost overruns.
The Indiana Energy Association, which represents about a dozen utility companies, said none of its members is planning to build a nuclear plant in Indiana.
But some legislators, including Hershman, said they wanted to make the state attractive for a nuclear plant in the future by offering more incentives, such as ratepayer financing of new plants as they are constructed.
"Without the change in law provided in SB 251, it would be very difficult for such a plant to be constructed here," Stan Pinegar, president of the Indiana Energy Association, said in an e-mail afterward.
The bill would also direct the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to "exercise all necessary caution" to avoid disclosing confidential information it receives from utilities to the public during rate cases or capital projects.
In recent months, several organizations, including The Indianapolis Star and Citizens Action Coalition, separately have filed open-records requests with the IURC, asking to see inspection reports on the construction of Duke Energy Corp.'s new power plant in Edwardsport, which has been plagued with cost overruns and delayed by accidents.
The IURC has denied the requests, citing state privacy laws on such reports. The new bill underscores the state's efforts to keep such information private.
Some consumer and environmental advocates on Wednesday urged the Senate to drop that requirement from the bill, but the committee kept it in.
"When you deal with regulated utility monopolies, transparency in the process is critical," said the Sierra Club's Mullet.
Call Star reporter John Russell at (317) 444-6283.
Editor's Note: I distributed a handout of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) on SB 251 to provide a summary of SB 251. Although I plan to revise this document to add suggestions on how to amend and hence improve SB 251, please find a link to the document I distributed yesterday.
I encourage this blog's readers to read SB 251 for themselves and to contact their State Senators this weekend to express their views about this proposed legislation.
Laura Ann Arnold
Agenda for : Senate Utilities & Technology Committee
Thursday, February 10, 2011
09:00 AM EST
Senate Chamber, State House, Indianapolis, IN
Committee Chairman : Merritt
Committee Members :
Leising R.M., Gard, Kruse, Schneider, Tomes, Yoder
Randolph R.M.M., Breaux, R. Young
Committee Hearing :
SB 0251 Clean energy. (Gard, Merritt, Hershman, Boots)
Clean energy. Requires the Indiana utility regulatory commission (IURC) to allow an energy utility to recover certain federally mandated costs through periodic retail rate adjustment mechanisms. Changes the term "clean coal and energy projects" to "clean energy projects" to allow the term to include nuclear energy production or generating facilities. Provides that: (1) nuclear energy production or generating facilities; and (2) purchases of energy produced by the facilities; qualify for financial incentives available for clean energy projects. Provides that a combined heat and power facility qualifies as a renewable energy resource for purposes of financial incentives for clean energy projects. Provides that an eligible business may recover qualified utility system expenses associated with a: (1) new energy production or generating facility; or (2) new nuclear energy production or generating facility. Requires the IURC to adopt rules to establish the voluntary clean energy portfolio standard program to provide incentives to participating electricity suppliers to supply specified percentages of electricity from clean energy sources. States three clean portfolio standard goals (CPS goals) that a participating electricity supplier must achieve to qualify for an incentive. Provides that a participating electricity supplier may own or purchase clean energy credits to meet a CPS goal. Beginning in 2014, requires: (1) a participating electricity supplier to report annually to the IURC on the supplier's efforts to meet the CPS goals; and (2) the IURC to include in its annual report to the regulatory flexibility committee a summary of the information reported by participating electricity suppliers.
The reprinted version of the bill was not available at the time of this blog post, so please find here a copy of the Committee Report containing the strip and insert amendment which becomes the new bill language.
SB 0054 Local regulation of video service franchises. (Holdman)
SB 0480 Various communications matters. (Hershman)