SPRINGFIELD — As Illinois residents deal with higher electricity bills, two local legislators have differing opinions on who’s to blame and how the state can turn things around.
“The bulk of the increase can be attributed to growing corporate use of energy and higher costs of reserve power,” said state Rep. Carol Ammons, D-Urbana, who chairs the Illinois House Energy and Environmental Committee. “Residents are not cooling their homes at lower temperatures, and they aren’t forgetting to turn the lights off — it’s the meteoric rise of energy-intensive technologies, such as the expansion of data centers, that are burdening our grid.”
While state Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, agrees that data centers are increasing the demand for electricity, he believes that one of the main causes for the higher bills is “the (Gov. J.B.) Pritzker-backed legislative subsidization of wind and solar.”
He said that these efforts, along with the transition away from coal and natural gas, are driving up rates.
Pritzker’s “push to increase, to bring AI data centers to Illinois, just brings more demand to the program,” Rose said. “In the meantime, you’re closing … incumbent energy generators, and there’s more to be closed. And so it’s … the perfect squeeze play.”
Rose added that while there are places where solar energy makes sense, such as rooftop panels for individual homes, solar farms that take up thousands of acres of prime farmland are “insane.”
“It is absolute folly to believe that wind and solar were ever going to be able to replace the baseload electrons of coal and the natural-gas-fired peaker plants that have not only already closed but are slated to close, OK?” Rose said. “And so in the near term, this only gets worse.”
Ammons disagrees, saying that solar, wind and other renewable-energy sources are “cheaper and more reliable than the coal and gas sources of the past.” She also noted that fossil fuels are a source of pollution and have a “finite supply.”
“The higher prices we’re seeing are caused by an increased strain on the energy pool by corporate entities, such as data centers, and the ever-rising price of capacity, the energy reserves we need,” she said. “These are two of the principal reasons for price increases, and redressing these factors must be our focus as a state.”
Ammons said the state must get more involved with regulating “how energy is used by big business and how the utilities charge all of us for that.”
Rose, on the other hand, said that the state needs to “immediately back off” closing coal and natural-gas plants, and bring more of the latter online.
“Markets are supply and demand,” he said, adding that the state needs to stop subsidizing wind and solar.
He also believes that, in the long term, nuclear microreactors are an important energy solution, but “it’s not anytime soon.”
Ammons said the state has “abundant renewable-energy resources” without using nuclear microreactors.
— JANA WIERSEMA