* This article from Capitol News Illinois stirred up some controversy…

State law currently says that by the 2025 delivery year, one-quarter of electricity purchased by the state must come from renewable sources. Goals laid out in CEJA are even more ambitious, requiring the state’s energy production to be carbon-free by 2045.

But the Illinois Power Agency – which handles energy procurement for the state’s utilities – reports that the state is lagging far behind its goals. In its current long-term plan for renewable purchasing, which was published in May, the agency projected that by the 2025 delivery year, only 8.1 percent of electricity will come from sources that qualify as renewable under state law.

“Achieving these goals would require a substantial increase in new renewable energy generation,” according to the agency’s report.

The federal Energy Information Administration, which uses a slightly different method to calculate its figures, reports that 15.4 percent of Illinois’ electricity generation came from renewables in October. That lags the state’s statutory goal for this year of 22 percent and behind the nation’s average renewable electricity generation of 22.3 percent.

* The governor’s spokesperson Jordan Abudayyeh, tweeted in response, “IL isn’t behind in our energy goals and I wouldn’t use a report from May of last year to make that point. … Carbon-free is different than renewable energy and IL will rely heavily on nuclear to reach our carbon-free goals.”

Carbon-free is hugely important in the mix because the state gets more than half of its electrical power from nuclear plants.

* Since numbers from the Illinois Power Agency were used in the news story, I reached out to the agency to get their perspective…

Hi Rich,

We were not contacted by CNI on this story, so we can’t speak authoritatively on from where CNI pulled this information. It’s possible that the “May report” in the article refers to the Modified 2022 Long-Term Renewables Procurement Plan, but RPS [Renewable Portfolio Standards] goal/target data contained is indeed approximately two years outdated (as that Plan was originally filed with the ICC in January 2022). So, assuming that CNI used this document to inform its article, the Governor’s Office is correct that this information is outdated.

To the broader question, our 2022 Annual Report includes data on the overall nameplate capacity amount of installed renewable energy generation physically located in Illinois. The 2022 Annual Report shows the total installed percentage of renewable capacity at 18.6%, with the percentage of megawatt hours from renewables at 12.4%. These are percentages out of all electricity generation in Illinois, as opposed to all electricity consumed in Illinois—if the latter were used as the denominator, then these percentages would be higher [about 17 percent, as it turns out], as Illinois is a net exporter of electricity.

The Agency’s next annual report is due out on February 15 and will be published on the IPA’s website. I will make sure we send you a copy of the report when it’s published.

Setting aside the issue of outdated data, conflating RPS progress with overall share of electricity from renewables statewide is a common area of misunderstanding—people often reference the former while meaning the latter. To address this concern, CEJA (through changes to Section 1-125 of the IPA Act) now requires the IPA to report on items including “the percentage of installed and scheduled renewable energy generation capacity as a share of overall electricity generation capacity physically located in Illinois” through its annual report. We’d be happy to follow up with our latest copy of that report when it becomes available.

…Adding… CNI has now corrected its story.