SB5007 – Uses savings from suspending conservation and planning requirements for utilities to fund customer assistance and write off unpaid bills.
Prime Sponsor – Senator Van de Wege (D; 24th District; Sequim)
Current status – Assigned to the Senate Committee on Environment, Energy and Technology
Next step would be – Scheduling a hearing
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Summary –
In the four years from 2022 through 2026, the bill would relieve utilities getting at least 80% of their power from clean sources from their obligations to create integrated resource plans and report on their compliance with I-937’s requirements.  If a utility’s costs for customer bill assistance, losses from unpaid bills, and conservation in the four years from 2020 through 2024 met or exceeded the level of its expenditures on energy conservation in 2018 and 2019, the bill would count that as meeting its obligation to pursue all cost-effective energy conservation.

The bill says any utility savings from these changes must be used for “financial support to customers that have been economically impacted by COVID-19”, but doesn’t provide any details about how these are supposed to be determined or equitably distributed. (As noted above, it specifies that a utility’s losses from any unpaid customer bills are to be treated as “indirect customer assistance”.)