Illinois

Clean energy advocates in Illinois pushed energy legislation until the final day of session, but were unable to get the battery storage-focused bill over the line. There’s still hope that the package could be picked back up in a special or veto session later this year. Solstice and Nexamp held meetings with all five Illinois Commerce Commissioners in June to discuss a range of issues we’ve experienced regarding the rollout of consolidated billing. Meaningful progress has been hard to come by via direct engagement with both utilities, but Solstice remains committed to ensuring that the single-bill offering in Illinois works for subscribers and asset owners alike. Lastly, the 2025/26 program year opened for Illinois Shines with new community solar capacity.

ComEd’s community solar subscribers have been dealing with billing issues since the utility’s system upgrade early last year. For the past several months, subscribers on consolidated billing projects have been seeing presentation issues and erroneous charges on their bills (see details from our friends at Illinois’ Citizens Utility Board). The good news is that this issue has finally been resolved as of mid-February. In the coming months, we’ll be watching an industry bill (HB 3758) which would improve the net crediting (consolidated billing) model to align with New York and New Jersey.

ComEd has returned to its regular community solar crediting cadence after spending the last several months applying credits that were missing from customer bills dating back to February. Community solar providers have resumed billing customers for new credits and are beginning to bill for the delayed credits, now that customers are finally seeing those savings. Progress has been made but the billing system upgrade issues are not yet behind us. Over the next few months, we will better understand the impacts to community solar’s reputation among ComEd customers and the revenue impacts across projects.

Earlier this year, ComEd completed the transition to a new billing system, which has come with a host of issues for the utility’s customers. The biggest issue in community solar is that subscribers did not see any credits on their bills in February, March, April, or May. The Illinois Commerce Commission has been facilitating weekly meetings between community solar stakeholders and ComEd, via which the utility has communicated it expects to have issued 100% of the delayed credits to customers by the end of July.

On February 22, the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) released its final order approving the Illinois Power Agency’s Long-Term Renewable Resources Procurement Plan for 2024. Highlights for the Adjustable Block Program include that the ICC will continue allowing large accounts to split subscriptions across projects and interconnection agreements will continue to earn points toward community solar applications. For Illinois Solar for All, master-metered buildings will unfortunately only be allowed on projects as anchor tenants beginning in the coming program year.

New capacity for the 24/25 Illinois Shines’ program year is scheduled to open on June 1. The Illinois Solar for All program released its latest community solar awards on January 23. Approval of the Illinois Power Agency’s 2024 Long-Term Renewable Resources Procurement Plan is expected by February 20 via an ICC decision.