Maryland’s 2026 legislative session represented a challenging playing field for advancing climate and environmental legislation, marked heavily by the dual considerations of budget shortfalls — driven by the federal government’s abandonment of funding critical programs and sowing chaos among the numerous federal workers who live in Maryland — and uncertainty as to long-term energy reliability and affordability placing a pall on energy planning in the state.
This year, the Center engaged in the legislative session alongside numerous partners and allies who took up the challenge. In particular, we thank those advocates who built upon work related to electric affordability and reliability in the PJM Interconnection footprint — advancing matters such as large load additions (e.g. data centers), grid enhancing and advanced transmission technologies, limiting excessive executive pay for the Maryland utility executives, and the need for targeted investments in clean energy, particularly heat pump installations in the state from the Strategic Energy Investment Fund (SEIF).
The Center joined our partners and allies in advocacy for these issues and approaches in standalone bills, and ultimately in their inclusion in the omnibus energy bill called the Utility Relief Act (HB1532/SB0841). If signed by Gov. Wes Moore, this legislation will reduce energy costs and bolster clean energy deployment.
Upon request from our partners, the Center also joined a community-centered effort to support the CHERISH Our Communities Act. The bill would have given teeth to environmental permitting in Maryland and ensured that disproportionately burdened communities would have greater legal protections from historic and new polluting facilities that contribute to cumulative health impacts on residents. In particular, the Center worked on language that would have given the Maryland Public Service Commission the authority to deny permits for new fossil fuel-fired generating facilities in environmental justice communities — a necessary step in addressing the state’s legacy of disproportionately clustering these facilities in frontline communities.
Although industry pressure undercut the impact of the CHERISH Act to the point of rendering it nonviable for passage this year, we hope to continue to be a partner to support a future version of the bill. We will continue to work with allies to engage in the permitting process for such facilities to ensure common sense protections against cumulative impacts from polluting methods of generating energy.
In addition to supporting good public policy during the 2026 legislative session, the Center pushed back against bills that would have undercut public health, Maryland’s climate goals, and energy affordability for ratepayers. In some instances, these bills were misleadingly presented as though they would improve public outcomes.
For example, a bill (which was temporarily adopted into the Senate version of the Utility Relief Act) to study energy generation costs might seem like a good thing, but the devil is always in the details. Requiring the Maryland Public Service Commission to spend $500,000 of ratepayer dollars to conduct a study on costs based not on traditional electricity generation cost methodologies — e.g. levelized cost of electricity, or similarly vetted cost models — but rather the unvetted and politically charged “levelized full system cost of electricity” model would have been a waste of time and money and could have paved the way for unhelpful and even damaging policy decisions. That model was created to evaluate a hypothetical grid under conditions that heavily favor fossil and nuclear generation and has been utilized by the fossil fuel industry and anti-wind and solar groups to undercut support for actual least-cost generation types, like renewables.
Similarly, seizing on rising costs for electricity and the volatility of PJM’s markets, the Exelon utilities (BGE, Delmarva, and Pepco) supported legislation that would once again allow them to own rate-based generation in the state. This would have allowed them to reap massive profits while placing the risk of cost overruns and stranded assets onto the ratepaying public.
In both instances, the Center worked with allies and submitted testimony delving into the technical underpinnings of these bills to rebut the supposed benefits while highlighting the negative impacts such legislation would inflict. Fortunately, both bills failed to advance.
