FRANKFORT — A Kentucky House committee advanced two bills expanding the membership of the state’s longstanding utility regulator and reshaping a relatively new energy planning agency, changing or removing language that had received strong pushback.
The two bills, Senate Bill 8 and Senate Bill 100, unanimously approved by the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee Thursday morning, moved a step closer to a vote by the GOP-controlled House. Substitute bill language made significant changes to each bill.
SB 8 would expand the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC) from three to five members, along with requiring specific experience for each new commissioner to be approved to serve.
A previous version of SB 8 would have allowed Republican State Auditor Allison Ball to appoint two of the five commissioners, along with administratively attaching the PSC to the auditor’s office.
Those provisions are removed, and under the new version of SB 8, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear would make all five appointments to the PSC. Each appointment would still have to be confirmed by the Kentucky Senate. The new version also removes language that environmental groups feared would have created barriers to intervene in utility cases before the PSC.
Language remains in SB 8 that gives the PSC more independence over procurement, purchases and hiring consultants.
House Majority Caucus Chair Suzanne Miles, R-Owensboro, who testified for the new version of SB 8, told the Lantern the changes were about streamlining the agency and “getting them more help” in helping to advance economic development.
When asked why PSC appointments were kept with the governor, Miles said it would have meant a “drastic shift in how you go about the administrative side” of the PSC.
The PSC has a wide range of responsibilities, regulating the rates and services of more than 1,100 utilities—from massive investor-owned electric utilities such as Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities to rural water districts that provide drinking water to small communities. The regulator also fields complaints from Kentuckians about service and rates and hears requests from utilities to retire or build new power generation.
Changes to bill reshaping Energy Planning and Inventory Commission
Henderson state Sen. Robby Mills also made changes to his SB 100 before it passed the committee. Environmental groups and an open government advocate warned a previous version of SB 100 would exempt the Energy Planning and Inventory Commission, or EPIC, from Kentucky’s Open Records Act and essentially allow EPIC to operate in secrecy.
EPIC was created by the legislature in 2024 to review requests from utilities to retire fossil fuel-fired power plants before they reach the PSC, along with studying the state’s electricity generation and transmission.
When lawmakers created EPIC two years ago, it faced backlash from investor-owned utilities and environmental groups who argued it put up costly bureaucratic barriers to replacing outdated coal-fired power plants with newer technology. Republicans argued they wanted to prevent such power plants from retiring too soon. The law creating EPIC declared that “the health, happiness, safety, economic opportunity, and general welfare” of Kentuckians “will be promoted and protected” by operating fossil fuel-fired power plants.
The new version of SB 100 passed by the committee would narrow the open records exemption provided to EPIC to apply only to records, information and correspondence submitted to EPIC by a utility that the utility designates as “confidential business information” that, if disclosed, would create an “unfair commercial advantage to competitors of the utility”.
Mills told the Lantern he heard pushback about the broad open records exemption in the original bill and that he narrowed the exemption after consulting with EPIC’s executive director Eric King. He said he wants to get a better understanding of how the state’s power plants are run.
“That’s the root of a lot of this planning is going to be, really getting the real information,” Mills said. “I think in order to get the real information, those small tidbits have to be shielded.”
SB 100 still shifts responsibility for appointing EPIC’s powerful executive committee from the governor to Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman. Most of the agency’s investigatory and research power is vested in the executive committee. A Beshear spokesperson had called the bill an unconstitutional attempt to strip power from a Democratic governor and give it to a Republican.
The bill significantly empowers King, giving him the ability to request records from any state agency and requiring the agency to comply.
The bill also removes Rodney Andrews, the director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research, from EPIC’s powerful executive committee and replaces him with the commission’s vice-chair, currently Jeffrey Brock, a business manager and engineer for a subsidiary of Alliance Resource Partners. Alliance’s CEO is Republican megadonor and coal magnate Joe Craft.
Mills said the changes to EPIC’s executive committee giving the executive director more power grew from his concern that the agency was “turning into a bureaucratic paper pusher.”
“We want you to give us information back in the next year or so. And it just seemed like it was just bogged down,” said Mills, referencing the slow pace of appointments to EPIC. “That’s why we kind of turned it around to where it’s more driven by the executive director than the executive.”
“I see where people might be a little concerned about that, but we’ve got to have somebody that’s driving this. And think the executive director is the right one to kind of push and drive this,” Mills said.
Environmental groups and an open government advocate told the Lantern SB 100 is improved, though some still have concerns that the narrowed open records exemption still provides utilities too much power to decide what records to withhold from members of the public and media who file requests under the Kentucky Open Records Act.
Amye Bensenhaver, the co-director of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition and a former Kentucky assistant attorney general, said she thinks EPIC would still have to provide some proof that a utility’s records are confidential under the state’s transparency law.
Scottie Ellis, a spokesperson for Beshear, in a statement said both SB 8 and SB 100 “are better” than previous versions but did not offer details on what was improved.
