An Iowa legislator who heads a key committee in the state Senate said a bill will move forward that would enable MidAmerican Energy to seek permission to build and pay for a new nuclear plant.
Democratic Sen. Matt McCoy said the Senate Commerce Committee will pass a compromise bill Thursday, Iowa media reported. He described the compromise as empowering the state to require the utility to complete the plant if its financing and construction receive state regulatory approval.
MidAmerican Energy is on the customer advisory board of small modular reactor developer NuScale Power and has studied the feasibility of building a new nuclear plant in Iowa. Last year the House approved a similar bill that would allow MidAmerican to collect money from ratepayers for a plant in advance of its completion. Following cost overruns and abandoned reactor projects in the late 1970s and 1980s, many states prohibited utilities from raising capital from ratepayers for nuclear plants before they came online.
In an open letter, MidAmerican CEO Bill Fehrman sought to reassure ratepayers that the bill currently under consideration does not equate to permission to build a plant or increase rates to pay for it. Rather, he wrote, “It gives the Iowa Utilities Board authority to decide if a plant should be built, when it should be built, and how much customers will pay. This bill has the strongest consumer protections of any enacted energy legislation. Once passed, control over funding and completion of any nuclear project rests solely with the Iowa Utilities Board.”
Iowa’s lone, 640-megawatt reactor at NextEra Energy’s Duane Arnold plant currently provides about 10 percent of the state’s electricity generation, according to the Energy Information Administration. Whether additional reactors will be built in the state is now up to the full state Senate, which may or may not make a decision on the MidAmerican bill this year.