The Illinois Commerce Commission authorized a study of the most affordable way for the state to meet its building decarbonization goals. The report has fundamental flaws but critical insights.
Illinois’s landmark Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA) sets the goal of 100 percent clean energy across the state by 2050. For nonelectric sources of emissions and transportation—such as the 17 percent of emissions that occur when we burn gas to heat our homes and other buildings where we live, work, and play—CEJA provides little direction on how these sectors are expected to align with the state’s climate goals.
The Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC), which regulates the state’s electric and gas utilities, showed real leadership in 2023 when it found that “if the decarbonization goals of CEJA are to be met, the gas distribution system as currently operated will need to change.” To chart that change, the ICC launched a Future of Gas (FOG) open stakeholder process to identify the most efficient, cost-effective path to a gas system that fits the state’s climate goals.
As part of this FOG process, the ICC authorized a consultant to model five pathways to that CEJA-compliant system by 2050. In its recently released Gas Decarbonization Pathways Study, the consultant modeled a range of scenarios, from one where the state invests heavily in energy efficiency and helps customers replace outdated gas appliances with high-efficiency electric alternatives to others that rely on unproven biofuels with no clear evidence that they can be produced at anything close to the scale needed.
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