HB2131– Promoting the establishment of thermal energy networks.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Ramel (D; 40th District; Bellingham) (Co-Sponsor Slatter, D)
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Environment & Energy on January 16th. Replaced by a substitute and passed out of committee January 23rd. Scheduled for a hearing in the House Committee on the Capital Budget at 8:00 AM on Thursday February 1st.
Next step would be – Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
SB6138 is a companion bill in the Senate.

In the House –
There’s a staff summary of the changes made by the substitute at the beginning of it.

Summary –
The bill would authorize electrical and gas companies to own, operate, or manage nonemitting thermal energy networks piping fluids for transferring heat in and out of buildings to improve energy efficiency and/or eliminate the greenhouse gas emissions of current heating and cooling, domestic hot water or refrigeration. Investor owned projects would have to be reviewed and approved by the UTC, which could authorize the recovery of the costs in rates; public projects would be reviewed and approved by their governing bodies.

The bill would create a pilot project program, giving investor owned gas companies priority for developing projects in their service areas if they notified the UTC of their intention to do a project within a year after the bill took effect and deployed a project within 30 months. The bill would require the UTC to consider a considerable number of factors in deciding whether to approve projects, including the customers and low-income customers served, the use of the existing natural gas workforce and efforts to transition it to thermal energy work, maintaining infrastructure safety and reliability; its ability to meet 100 percent of the customers’ demand for space heating; public health benefits, coordination with any electric utility providing service to the area, and its potential to enable gas pipeline decommissioning and supplant the need for gas pipeline replacement and the associated costs. (There are other items, as well as a list of optional factors that the UTC might take into consideration.) Companies would have to include pilot projects in their RFP’s requests for energy resources, and if a company determined it could deploy a pilot project at the lowest reasonable cost itself instead of deploying one through a heat purchase or energy services agreement, it would be authorized to do that. The UTC might authorize merging a company’s rate bases for its gas and thermal network operations; if a company did that it would have to monetize any benefits it received from Federal and State incentives and use them to mitigate rate impacts on customers.

The bill would require the Department of Commerce to create a grant program to support gas company projects in the program, subject to the availability of amounts specifically appropriated for that. Grants would cover the difference between the company’s lowest reasonable cost resources under its current business practices and the costs of building and operating the pilot project. In reviewing grants, Commerce would consider the same factors that the UTC would be required to take into account in deciding whether to approve them.

The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Committee would review the program and report on it to the appropriate committees of the Legislature.