Lawmakers took the first steps Thursday on the road to a compromise offshore wind and climate bill as House and Senate leads publicly detailed some of the issues they expect to spend part of the next three months hashing out.
By the end of July, representatives and senators will attempt to square the offshore wind-focused bill (H 4515) that the House passed in March with the broader climate and energy bill (S 2842) that cleared the Senate last month. The House has named Rep. Jeff Roy, its chairman of the Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy Committee, Rep. Tackey Chan and Minority Leader Brad Jones as its negotiators with Senate counterparts expected to be named in the coming days.
During a State House News Service event in Boston on Thursday morning, Roy and Sen. Michael Barrett, the Senate chairman of TUE, each pitched their chamber's bill and looked ahead to how the two approaches might be reconciled. The House bill is essentially a deep dive on offshore wind policy while the Senate's legislation is a more broad climate and energy bill that touches upon offshore wind but also deals with topics like climate resilience, solar policy and electric vehicles.
"Despite the significant difference in emphasis, there's much that Jeff and I agree with ... we're going to have no difficulty discussing all of these things," Barrett said. "But this is going to be hard, all kidding aside, because the Senate has views ... on solar, on the relative importance of offshore wind, on how to approach transmission ... so this isn't going to be a simple matter of everything the Senate wants to do on electric vehicles being traded for an important offshore wind piece and everything we hope to do for cities on clean buses being traded for another offshore wind piece."
Many conference committee negotiations end up with horse-trading, where one branch agrees to accept a provision championed by the other branch in exchange for securing its own priority in the final version. But Barrett suggested Thursday that the Senate's interest in offshore wind policy could mean that the conference is more about getting the House to agree to some of the non-wind policies that the Senate will be pushing for.
"Because we ourselves feel that the policies in offshore wind are so important, this isn't going to be trading one of our apples for one of the House's oranges and neatly coming to a conclusion," he said. "This is going to be very tough stuff."
Roy made the case for a bill more narrowly focused on the burgeoning offshore wind industry, telling attendees that officials in surrounding states that are also pursuing offshore wind are the only people who would be happy to see Massachusetts forgo the opportunities in front of it.
"We need to spend a great deal of time and energy, no pun intended, on offshore wind because it's an opportunity that's right here in our laps," Roy said.
Barrett said Thursday that, for him and the Senate, it is important that any bill that the Legislature gets done this session accounts for the fact that a new governor and new administration will be in place come January.
"The idea that we're going to write the bill on transmission and even on offshore wind that's going to close her out of the conversation -- and that's what the House bill would do given the timelines in the House bill, which in many cases force a rush to judgment by the end of this calendar year -- the idea that we're going to close her out of the conversation is a non-starter for the Senate," Barrett said. "So we are in a situation where we need to heed our outgoing governor in order to honor our incoming one. And we need to make sure that timing and patience and the deadlines set in a consensus piece of legislation are the appropriate ones. That's going to require some changes by both branches."
Roy, who like Barrett has endorsed Attorney General Maura Healey in the contest for governor, did not appear to be as concerned about leaving room for the next governor to become involved in policy-setting.
"It's my understanding that the Legislature makes the laws and sets the policy and the governor executes what we do," he said.
The only non-starter that Roy mentioned was "not getting a bill done."
"I want a bill done, Senator Barrett wants a bill done, Speaker [Ronald] Mariano wants a bill done, Senator [Karen] Spilka wants a bill done, Governor Baker wants a bill done, the commonwealth of Massachusetts wants a bill done," Roy said. "We have a responsibility and we have a climate crisis and the time is now. I will commit to using every ounce of my energy and blood to reach a deal with the Senate on this to get this bill done."
In a keynote address before the Roy/Barrett panel, Gov. Charlie Baker made his own pitch for one element he wants to see in whatever energy or climate bill makes it to his desk: significant money put towards an energy innovation fund. The governor has proposed using $750 million in American Rescue Plan Act money to create an investment fund at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to advance clean energy research and technologies.
"We sit here in Massachusetts at the heart of some of the most important developments in life sciences that have taken place in the past kind of 15 years. And I think it's fair to say that what innovation brought to dealing with COVID, in particular, went way beyond people's wildest expectations," he said. The governor added, "There's a lot we can do in environmental policy and net-zero with policies and that's a good thing. Innovation is going to be a big part ... it's actually going to get us all the way there faster."
Neither the House nor the Senate has proposed any similar level of funding. The House bill would raise $35 million annually through a new charge on gas customers and direct an existing charge on electric customers to a new Offshore Wind Industry Trust Fund to provide tax credits for investments and job creation by wind companies.
The Senate's bill includes about $250 million in money from the state's General Fund for clean energy research and technology, workforce enhancement and training, electric vehicle rebates and incentives, and for the development of an electric vehicle charging infrastructure deployment plan.
"I want Massachusetts, we should all want Massachusetts, to be the player in energy innovation, whether it's around wind, storage, hydrogen, and other developments associated with the electrification of so many parts of our economy. There will be other states that will put big money up alongside whatever their industry partners are doing to access the billions of dollars in federal funds that will be made available over the course of the next five years to invest in the next act of technology solutions to many of these challenges we face," Baker said. Turning towards Roy and Barrett in the audience, he continued, "I really think Massachusetts should be one of those. While I'm speaking to all of you in the room here today, I'm especially speaking to my colleagues over here because we have the resources to make a major investment in innovation."
