By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — The Indiana House took its first step toward creating a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) by passing Senate Bill 206 on a 77-20 vote.
Introduced by Rep. Dale Grubb (D-Covington) with the support of Rep. Dave Crooks (D-Washington), the bill includes a requirement that 10 percent of the state’s electricity come from homegrown renewable sources, such as wind and biomass, by 2025.
The Indiana Coalition for Renewable Energy and Economic Development (ICREED) praised the bill’s passage while at the same time sounding a need for an earlier timeline.
“The RES in SB 206 will carve out a new, competitive market for renewable electricity production that will bring significant billions in investment, thousands of jobs to the state and, by promoting clean energy resources, will improve environmental quality” said Brian Wright, a member of ICREED and the Hoosier Environmental Council.
“Some of the provisions in the RES in SB 206, however, unnecessarily delay this investment and, in effect, reduce the amount of new clean energy generation from 10 percent to six percent by 2025.
“We hope that the Conference Committee in the Indiana legislature remedies these issues so that the full potential of an RES is realized,” he added.
An earlier proposal to establish a 10 percent RES by 2017, in contrast, would have brought $5-6 billion dollars of economic investment and thousands of construction, operations and maintenance jobs in a much shorter time frame than SB 206, and would do so with minimal rate impact to customers, according to ICREED’s Jesse Kharbanda.
Stephen Jones, Midwest Director for enXco Energy, feels a more ambitious timeline for an RES, such as the 2017 proposal, is doable in Indiana from both a technical and economic perspective.
Steve Aker of Vermillion County-based White Construction said Indiana’s combination of dense transmission infrastructure, excellent wind potential and proximity to big cities, like Chicago, has drawn the attention of many investors and the Department of Energy’s Wind Powering America.
“They view Indiana as one of its top three Midwest priority states,” he added.
Kharbanda argues that those facts, coupled with the state’s strong biomass resources, are even more reason to strive for an RES with an earlier target date to reach 10 percent.
Despite needed improvements that ICREED sees in SB 206, Coalition members such as Grant Smith, executive director of the Citizens Action Coalition, feel the bill is stronger than one recently passed out of the Senate.
“The RES in the House version of SB 206,” he said, “is much more in line with the purpose of an RES than the version amended into HB 1824 in the Indiana Senate. It promotes energy efficiency as a low-cost way to reduce electricity consumption and includes exclusively ‘renewable’ resources such as wind, biomass and solar power, rather than, as HB 1824 does, ’clean coal’ and toxic waste coal, major causes of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.
“We praise the efforts of state representatives Crooks and Grubb,” he added, “and we will continue to work closely with legislators wanting Indiana to truly get to a vision of 25 percent of Indiana’s energy coming from renewable resources by 2025.”
Sounding a solid amen to that, Les Zimmerman of the Indiana Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts said,
“Renewable electricity is a win-win proposition. The economic implications for the state’s agricultural sector and rural communities are huge, the environmental, public health and energy security benefits obvious.
“The technology is here and now. We applaud the Indiana House for embracing our energy future.” This farm news was published in the April 25, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
