House Committee Passes WY Bill To Keep Coal Plants Running

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Jim Bridger Power Plant. Photo courtesy of the Jim Bridger Power Plant/PacifiCorp website.

(February 21, 2019) – Wyo4News has learned from the Facebook page of Rep. Clark Stith (R) that the House Committee of the whole passed Senate File 159 today.

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The bill’s aim according to Stith was “designed to put pressure on Rocky Mountain Power to keep the Jim Bridger power plant up and running. Specifically, SF159 requires that a public utility will only be able to recover the costs of a new power plant built to replace coal fired electric generation if the utility first makes a good faith effort to sell the facility to a third party operator, who could then sell electricity in the wholesale market or back to the utility.”

The bill was sponsored by Senator(s) Dan Dockstader (R), Eli Bebout (R), Ogden Driskill (R), Drew Perkins (R), Michael Von Flatern (R), and Jeff Wasserburger (R) and Representative(s) Eric Barlow (R), Tom Crank (R), Steve Harshman (R) and Evan Simpson (R).

See Senate File 159 in full here.

See Clark Stith’s full Facebook statement below.

“House committee of the whole just passed senate file 159, which is designed to put pressure on Rocky Mountain Power to keep the Jim Bridger power plant up and running. Specifically, SF159 requires that a public utility will only be able to recover the costs of a new power plant built to replace coal fired electric generation if the utility first makes a good faith effort to sell the facility to a third party operator, who could then sell electricity in the wholesale market or back to the utility. It is hard to know exactly how this will play out, but the idea is to incentivize Rocky Mountain Power to keep Bridger open and running through its 50th anniversary in 2037, as opposed to being decommissioned much earlier. Because there are approximately 1,200 direct local jobs at stake (between the power plant and the Bridger coal mine), I voted yes.” 

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Wyo4News was unable to reach Rocky Mountain Power for comment at the time of this posting.