HB2201 – Facilitating linkage of Washington’s carbon market with the California-Quebec market.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Doglio (D; 22nd District; Thurston County) (Co-Sponsor Fitzgibbon) By request of the Department of Ecology.
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Environment & Energy January 15th; replaced by a substitute and passed out of committee January 25th. Referred to Appropriations, and scheduled for a hearing there at 10:30 AM on Friday February 2nd.
Next step would be – Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.
SB6058 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 require the Department of Ecology to synchronize Washington’s compliance periods with those of a linked jurisdiction or jurisdictions, and it takes steps in that direction by defining them as a first period, a second period, and so on, as well as by no longer specifying their starting dates or their lengths in years.

It would allow Ecology to require electric power entities to report emissions of greenhouse gases from all electricity that is purchased, sold, imported, exported, or exchanged in Washington. It would eliminate a current exemption from the program’s requirements for the importers of power from unspecified sources with associated exemptions below 25,000 metric tons a year. It would also eliminate an exemption for imports of unspecified power that are balanced by exports of unspecified power by the same entity within the same hour to a jurisdiction that’s not covered by a linked program. It would remove Ecology’s authority to adjust the amount of monetary penalties or the number of penalty allowances in the first compliance period. (It would also specify that the Department is required to establish greenhouse gas emission reporting methodologies for covered entities.)

The bill would allow a general market participant to own more than 10 percent of total allowances to be issued in a calendar year if we linked with a jurisdiction that allowed that.

It would require offsets from a linked jurisdiction to have been generated from projects within that jurisdiction. It also revises the language about the use of offsets from projects on tribal lands. As I read the changes, they simply rephrase the current rules to make it clear that if you use some offsets from projects on tribal lands as part of your basic allowance for offsets, you still can use the additional tribal offsets in the option that allows you to cover some more obligations with those.

The bill also includes a provision to ensure it won’t be put on the ballot as an alternative to Initiative 2117, which would eliminate the cap and invest program.