Green Energy Legislation and Ratepayer Fees
In the beginning of June, The Community News Brief reported on rising prices of electricity (from 8.8 cents per kWh to 11.3 cents per kWh for customers of Ameren Illinois). Over the next few weeks, The Brief will publish a series of articles unpacking the local energy situation and some of the factors contributing to this rate hike. Stories today and Friday focus on the effects of green energy.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, over 20 percent of all electricity production in Illinois now comes from renewables like solar and wind. The transition to renewables is spurred by aggressive state legislation, which mandates Illinois to produce 100 percent clean energy by 2045. To encourage this, the state provides incentives to green energy producers, which are largely funded by ratepayers: Ameren customers can find line items under the “State and Local Taxes and Other Mandated Charges” section of their electricity bill, which represent fees collected to fund green energy. These fees represent a relatively small part of your electric bill (the average residence pays about $2-5/month for them), and they’ve remained static since 2021. However, there is a good chance they will increase over the next few years.
Illinois Energy Legislation
Illinois has a long history of progressive energy legislation. In 1997, the state passed the Illinois Electric Service Customer Choice and Rate Relief Law, which made Illinois into a deregulated market where it’s possible to pick your electric supplier. In 2007, we passed the Illinois Power Agency Act, which amongst other things established the Illinois Power Agency (IPA), whose responsibilities include planning for the state’s energy needs and purchasing electricity for utilities like Ameren to distribute to customers. Other provisions created by Illinois energy legislation include community solar (individuals can subscribe to a local solar farm and get a discounted rate on their utility bill) and municipal aggregation (communities are allowed to collectively purchase electricity for their members and bargain on their behalf for a lower price; Macomb does not pursue municipal aggregation). Because of provisions like these, The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit which tracks how well different states do protecting consumers and holding utilities accountable, gave Illinois a B on its Community Power Scorecard— the highest grade of any state in the union.
Illinois has carried forward this proactive legislative approach into the state’s green energy laws. The Illinois Power Agency Act, the same piece of legislation that established the IPA, mandated utility providers like ComEd and Ameren source at least 25 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2025. In 2016, Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into effect the Future Energy Jobs Act, which helped to procure funding for renewables and also required utilities to provide rebates helping consumers make their homes more energy efficient. In 2021, Gov. JB Pritzker signed into effect the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), which created a plan to close all fossil-fuel power plants by 2045 and to gradually replace them with renewables, requiring 40 percent of Illinois energy to come from renewables by 2030 and 50 percent by 2040. It also included incentives to expand use of electric vehicles throughout the state, providing funding to create charging stations and offering a rebate of up to $4,000 to Illinois residents who purchase an electric vehicle.
The most recent major piece of green energy legislation is the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act (CRGA), which was signed into law by Gov. Pritzker on Jan. 8, 2026 and went into effect on June 1. Some of the new provisions of this law include plans to add 3 GWs of grid-scale battery storage by 2030—batteries are an especially important complement for renewable energy as their capacity to store electricity on scale curbs the natural volatility of renewables (i.e., the batteries will store energy for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine). CRGA also creates a “virtual powerplant program,” where several small distributed energy resources—solar panels from your neighbor’s roof, batteries from your friend’s Tesla—can coordinate and function like one big power plant, directly marketing energy to utilities. The law also lifts the moratorium on new nuclear reactors and funds pilot programs for geothermal energy. Importantly, CRGA also provides the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) more legal authority to find and distribute resources to pursue the state’s energy goals.
Renewable Energy Credits A chief instrument by which the state encourages the transition to green energy is by awarding Renewable Energy Credit contracts, wherein utilities like Ameren are required to pay an additional sum to producers of green energy on top of the cost of the electricity itself. However, utilities ultimately source this money from ratepayers. When queried, a spokesperson for the IPA explained that renewable energy projects are “supported by ratepayer funds collected through a surcharge on ratepayer bills. That Ameren Illinois RPS surcharge is presently $4.58/MWh—just as it has been since CEJA’s passage in 2021—meaning that for an Ameren customer using 500 kwh (i.e., 0.5 MWh), that customer’s [renewable energy] surcharge would be approximately $2.29 total on their monthly bill.” Regarding a possible future increase of fees, the spokesperson further commented that “CRGA provisions allow for a minor inflationary adjustment and will eventually shift existing Zero Emission Standard charges into this charge, and the rate could further change through Integrated Resource Planning, but those future changes are not presently impacting customer rates.”
However, an increase in ratepayer fees may be unavoidable following the passage of U.S. federal statute H.R. 1 last year (popularized by President Donald Trump as the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act'). H.R. 1 phases out Investment Tax Credits, which were provided to producers of green energy under the Biden-Era Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
These tax credits represented a significant boon to green energy providers—a representative for the solar power company Nexamp estimated that it reduced their taxes by about 30 percent. The loss of these federal tax incentives threatens the viability of Illinois’ green energy projects. In their 2026 Long-Term Renewable Resources Procurement Plan, the IPA commented that “the changes resulting from losing [the Investment Tax Credits] are clear—new wind and solar projects will require substantially more funding through state incentive initiatives to be successfully developed.”
On Aug. 21, 2025, an emergency petition was filed to modify the IPA’s current Long-Term Renewable Resources Procurement Plan in response to H.R. 1. Most of these changes have amounted to frontloading or otherwise shifting around existing funding.
For example, the ICC approved for the IPA to pull forward about $20 million from its Renewables Energy Resources Fund. This enabled the IPA to support renewables through the near-term crisis of H.R. 1, but it significantly reduced funds that were earmarked for programs like Illinois Solar for All in the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 budgetary years.
If the current level of spending is to be maintained; however, then sooner or later new sources of revenue will have to be tapped. Empowered by CRGA, the ICC may propose collecting more money from ratepayers in the form of fees when they file their next Integrated Resource Plan.
When The Community News Brief inquired whether the ICC had any intentions along these lines, a spokesperson replied that they were still in the very early stages of planning and could not make a comment yet. The ICC is currently conducting a series of workshops to gather information and discuss ideas with stakeholders. They will file their new IRP report Nov. 15, 2026, and if it survives review, the new plan will be approved 180 to 360 days after the initial filing.
The ultimate hope is that fees supporting green energy will pay off in the long run financially as well as environmentally. The IPA, for example, has projected that the 3 GWs of battery storage mandated by CRGA could save Ameren and ComEd customers 13.4 billion dollars over the next twenty years. The state’s green energy legislation is not without its critics, however. Several Illinois Republican state senators and representatives have criticized CEJA’s mandate to get rid of all fossil fuel plants between 2030 and 2045, arguing that it has caused some coal and natural gas facilities to shutter early right when they’re needed most.
In the follow-up this Friday, The Community News Brief will examine some of these claims in more detail and ask some of McDonough County’s own solar and wind providers what the state’s energy situation looks like from their perspective.
