Washington House passes PSE natural gas ban days after cold snap hits energy grid

(The Center Square) - The Washington House of Representatives has passed a bill initially introduced last year banning Puget Sound Energy from providing natural gas in new residential or commercial construction.

Though the bill contained many revisions, critics say it’s fundamentally the same legislation, while supporters argued on the House floor that they expect a very separate version to come out of the Senate.

Among the big changes in a striking amendment to HB 1589 sponsored by Rep. Beth Doglio, D-Olympia, includes exemptions as follows:

For certain types of manufacturing facilities, Medical care or correctional facilities that are required to have emergency backup power generation systems, until Jan. 2040, Federal buildings that support “energy resilience, energy security, and energy efficiency initiatives"

Speaking on the House floor prior to the Jan. 22 vote, Doglio said “we in our state have set very important goals and very ambitious policy, and we keep working together to do better for our future generations. All those goals and policies require complementary policies to help us be successful, and that’s what this bill does.”

She added that “this bill isn’t perfect, but we have spent hours and hours stakeholdering the bill,” adding that she was “committed to removing a number of things in this bill because we listened to stakeholders” and they should expect “a very different bill in the Senate as we move forward.”

Among the legislators opposed to the bill was Rep. Peter Abbarno, R-Centralia, who said “you don’t even need a recent memory to think about a week or two ago when it was ten degrees, twelve degrees...and so many of our communities rely on natural gas and other sources of energy to stay warm.”

He added that “critical infrastructure needs natural gas. But we continue to go down the rabbit hole on policies like this with the promise that there was a lot of stakeholdering. But this was the same bill I saw in committee.”

Rep. Ed Orcutt, R-Kalama, told colleagues that the bill would cause industry like paper and pulp to pack up and leave the state.

“Here this bill chases environmental stewardship and yet causes the exact opposite to happen, because every time you lose a mill in the state of Washington a new mill starts up in China, where they don’t follow the same environmental regulations that we do here," he said.

Also critical of the bill was Rep. J.T. Wilcox, R-Yelm, who reiterated his opinion on the original proposal that “it’s still one of the most poorly thought out bills I’ve seen here. All of us are going to be at risk.”

The Building Industry Association of Washington also highlighted the recent low temperatures’ impact on the energy grid in its criticism of HB 1589.

“In voting for this bill, legislators are showing just how out of touch they are with the reality facing homeowners,” BIAW Executive Director Greg Lane said in a news release. “Not even two weeks have passed since thousands of Washington families fought bitter cold winter weather causing PSE to ask them to curb their energy use to reduce strain on the grid.”

The bill has been referred to the Senate Environment, Energy & Technology Committee.