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Oregon legislators passed Senate Bill (SB) 1547 into law yesterday, creating aggressive timetables for eliminating coal-fired electricity from the State and setting a 50% Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) by 2040. A diverse group of utilities, consumer advocacy organizations, and renewable energy advocates support the bill.  Next stop for SB 1547 is Oregon Governor Katherine Brown’s desk, where she is expected to sign the bill into law.

Key provisions and significance of SB 1547 include:

50% RPS by 2040

Oregon’s two largest utilities – PacifiCorp and PGE – will have a 50% RPS standard by 2040, meaning 50% of their electricity supply must be derived from renewable energy sources. The two largest utilities serve approximately 70% of Oregon customers’ electricity needs. There was no change to the existing requirements on consumer-owned utilities.

  • This is one of the most aggressive RPS standards in the nation, matched only by California and New York, which have a 50% target by 2030, Vermont, which has a 75% target by 2032, and Hawaii, which has a 100% target by 2045.
  • The existing ratepayer protections relating to RPS compliance were retained, capping the incremental costs of compliance at 4% of the utilities annual revenue requirement for a compliance year. A new provision was added to permit the Oregon PUC to temporarily suspend RPS compliance if the utility determines that grid reliability is seriously compromised.
  • The Oregon PUC will implement competitive bidding rules governing electric companies’ RPS implementation plans to ensure that electric companies acquire electricity from diverse renewable energy generators.

Continue Reading Oregon legislators pass historic renewable energy bill, with 50% RPS and coal-fired electricity phaseout

In his inaugural address earlier this month, Governor Brown, referenced several ambitious goals he would like to see accomplished over the next 15 years, including  increasing from one-third to 50 percent the amount of California’s electricity that must be derived from renewable resources. On January 28, 2015, a legislator joined in this ambitious goal setting,…

Yesterday, the Minnesota Department of Commerce issued its highly anticipated Minnesota Renewable Energy Integration and Transmission Study, which indicated that the “capacity for adding additional wind and solar up to 40% by 2030 can be reliably accommodated by the electric power system” (DOC press release here). The study stated that with relatively modest…

Assembly Bill (AB) 327 took effect in California at the first of the year, giving the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) authority to expand the State’s 33% Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). This week, the CPUC extended its RPS proceeding to determine, before February 2015, how to implement the new law. AB 327 provides that the CPUC may …

          Stoel Rives partner Bev Pearman reviewed the complaint filed Monday in American Tradition Institute, et al., v. Colorado and prepared this analysis:

          On April 4, 2011, the American Tradition Institute (“ATI”), the American Tradition Partnership (“ATP”), and Rod Lueck filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado arguing that…

An alert written by Stoel Rives partner Seth Hilton:

Last night, the California legislature failed to pass Senate Bill 722—the 33% Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) legislation—by the close of the legislative session. The bill would have increased California’s RPS to 33% for both investor-owned and publicly owned utilities. It would also have placed limits on the use of renewable resources located out-of-state to meet California’s RPS—utilities would have been required to meet a certain percentage of their RPS obligations through resources whose first point of interconnection was a California balancing authority, or whose power is transmitted to California through a dynamic transfer arrangement or scheduled hourly or inter-hourly into California. The proposed legislation also would have authorized the use of renewable energy credits (RECs)—the environmental attributes of renewable power separated from the power itself—for RPS compliance, but would have imposed limits on the amount of RECs that could be used to meet the utilities’ RPS obligation.Continue Reading California Legislature Fails to Pass 33% Renewable Portfolio Standard

With 3/5 of the States having Renewable Portfolio Standard in place and the prospect of a Federal RPS, many utilities are seeking to become first time purchasers of the output from wind projects. And utilities with a history of purchasing wind are seeking additional resources. In 2009, the presenters collectively worked on over 40 wind…