In the House – Passed
Had a hearing in the House Committee on Environment and Energy January 24th. Replaced with a substitute by the prime sponsor and passed out of committee February 9th. Referred to the Committee on the Capital Budget and had a hearing there February 20th. Amended to have more State systems and purely private systems comply with CETA by developing these plans. Passed out of committee February 22nd, referred to Rules, and passed by the House March 2nd.

Substitute –
The changes made by the substitute are summarized by staff at the beginning of it.

Summary –
The bill would require collections of five or more buildings with more than 100,000 square feet of conditioned space that are owned by the state and served by district heating or cooling systems to develop a decarbonization plan. These would have to include ways to replace fossil fuels in heating plants; evaluating options for partnering with nearby sources and uses of waste heat and cooling; examining opportunities to add buildings or other facilities to the system once it is decarbonized, a strategy to incentivize growth of a decarbonized system, and requirements for facilities joining the system; and evaluating the potential for reducing energy use through conservation. The bill would encourage including consideration of distribution network upgrades; on-site energy storage; space cooling for residential facilities; labor and workforce issues, including utilization of state registered apprentices; options for public-private partnerships; and the incorporation of industrial symbiosis projects or networks. The local utility would have to be consulted in the development of the plan; they’d be due to Commerce by June 30th, 2025.

The bill would exempt the buildings served by one of these systems from making any capital investments that might be required to meet the State’s Clean Buildings Act’s energy performance requirements if the owner was implementing or had fully implemented a decarbonization plan, and met the Act’s benchmarking, energy management, and operations and maintenance planning requirements. (The bill also says owners may not be required to make capital investments if they submit a request to Commerce once during every five-year compliance cycle as part of documentation required by the Act, and Commerce approves the request; it doesn’t seem to specify any criteria for granting or denying these requests.) Commerce would also guarantee that these systems would be considered to qualify with any requirements for implementing energy efficiency measures identified by an energy audit if an audit had demonstrated that the energy savings from measures to increase the efficiency of the district heating system would be greater than the savings from measures to increase the buildings’ efficiency, and the owner implemented the measures for the system.