2025 Climate Crisis and Energy Legislation

Priority Bills

Bills in green are supported. Bills in red are opposed by the League. Bills in black the League is watching.

HB 1015 Energy labeling of residential buildings. Making information about energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions available to homebuyers will help homebuyers make more informed decisions and cause the market to better value the home’s energy efficiency. If enacted, cities and counties will have the option to require that the owner of a single-family residence obtain and make available a home energy performance report before the residence may be publicly advertised for sale.

HB 1031 Mitigating the impact of rising school facility temperatures resulting from climate change. Not all school buildings have cooling systems adequate for the changing climate as daytime temperatures experience higher averages and extreme temperature swings. This bill will initiate a study and standards-setting process to keep schools at safe and learning-effective temperatures to accommodate such temperature instabilities.

HB 1183 Building code and development regulation reform. revises the Growth Management Act (GMA) providing regulatory relief setbacks, roof heights, and such to enable additional external thickness for retrofitted insulation on walls and roofs. This will enable energy efficiency retrofits for some houses and buildings currently at the building code limits.

HB 1328/SB 5359 Accelerating the development of clean energy and transmission. These bills, requested by the Department of Commerce, are designed to accelerate the pace of adequate, reliable, and affordable clean energy development and the needed transmission infrastructure in the state. The Department of Commerce will create an Office of Clean Energy Development as a source of: information and coordination among utilities, tribes, communities, and permitting authorities; collaboration with other states; procedures to ensure community benefits and workforce training. These objectives align with our support for legislation in past sessions.

HB 1514 Encouraging the deployment of low carbon thermal energy networks. Thermal energy networks tie together sources of zero carbon energy such ground source, geothermal, and waste heat to enable and optimize efficient reuse. Heat pumps efficiently increase the temperature of this free energy making it useful for valuable purposes. Unneeded or unwanted heat in one building is transported to another building where it’s needed. While the energy is free, transporting it requires investment in pipes, heat pumps, and other infrastructure. Then the continuing cost is only maintenance, not fuel. These principles also apply to sources of “cold” for cooling buildings in the network. This legislation provides some regulation relief for certain operations to make available the waste heat for this system application.

HB 1458 Reducing embodied carbon emissions of buildings and building materials. Buildings in WA state contribute about 25% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. This bill requires the State Building Code Council to adopt and amend rules as necessary to accomplish the embodied carbon emissions reductions required to achieve a 30% emission reduction under the 2030 state building codes. The Building Code Council implements established processes to write and revise codes with experts, comment periods, and public hearings. The 2024 legislature passed HB 1282 on Public Building Materials to reduce embodied carbon emissions covering projects larger than 100,000 gross square feet. HB 1458 covers buildings and renovations down to 50,000 square feet.

HB 1462 Reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with hydrofluorocarbons. Hydrofluorocarbons are potent greenhouse gases with global warming potentials that are hundreds to thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide. The widespread use of hydrofluorocarbons in refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pumps makes them significant contributors to climate change. Although usually short-lived, when vented those gases create an acute warming influence at a critical time in our mitigation efforts. Better working fluid alternatives are available and in use as covered in the LWVWA Action Workshop last December. Improvements such as this will be required as new technologies develop. We have advocated for similar policies in past legislative sessions.

HB 1598/SB 5515 Fair Access to Community solar projects. These are medium-sized solar arrays sited on landfills, former industrial sites, private lands, and other preferred areas near utility customers they will serve, including households, small businesses, and public service organizations. All project participants reduce their energy bills with the clean energy. These bills update rules to enable more low-income residents to access and benefit from solar energy with system installation funding from already established sources such as the Federal Inflation Reduction Act. We need to implement renewable energy at every opportunity to meet the WA state commitment of net zero emissions by 2050. More details on community solar from WSU.

HB 1689 Adopting emission standards for ocean-going vessels at berth. Enables WA Dept of Ecology to adopt California emission standards for ocean-going vessels at berth: reducing diesel, particulate, and GHG emissions, therefore reducing health-impairing and climate change increasing pollution, and standardizing regulations. Port operations, including vessel emissions, are a significant contributor to diesel particulate matter and greenhouse gases around Puget Sound, and maritime-related emissions make up 20 percent of total diesel particulate matter emissions.

HB 1819 Increasing Transmission Capacity—Reconductoring. Advanced transmission conductors exhibit reduced resistance and can operate at higher temperatures than conventional high-voltage electrical transmission cables. When legacy transmission cables are replaced with advanced cables, more energy can move through the existing transmission corridors with less transmission loss, and save the time required to permit and construct additional transmission. This bill adds passages to existing law to incentivize utilities to invest in advanced transmission to increase our grid capacity. We must invest in every available technology improvement to move the renewable energy from where we generate it to where we use it because our demand is growing.

HB 1871 Incentivizing grid-connected residential battery energy storage systems. Home battery systems supply backup power as well as store renewable energy from a home solar array, enabling the residents to bridge a power outage. A cluster of home or small-scale, permanent battery systems can also serve as buffer for utilities during periods of high demand or excess power generation. Such systems can reduce the need for constructing new grid-scale generation or transmission capability. This bill sets the terms for organizing such clusters, also known as distributed energy resources or virtual power plants on positive terms for both the home-owner and power company. Such systems are operating globally benefiting grid stability, local distribution system resiliency, and household energy security. Expect bill amendments to refine the policy, but the concept is needed as a step to reducing our emissions and increasing renewable energy.

SB 5174 Improving emission standards for new wood stoves. Fine particle pollution is a serious threat to human health, especially to children, the elderly, and people with heart and lung conditions. Smoke from burning wood for home heating is the largest source of pollution in the winter months and puts Washington at risk of exceeding federal air quality standards. This bill ensures the Department of Ecology has the ability to review and verify test reports and restrict the sale of deficient devices that do not meet EPA emission standards, but includes accommodations for existing stocks of new stoves that met previous EPA standards. It does not affect wood stoves that are already installed and used in people's homes.

SB 5236 Reduce anesthetic greenhouse gas emissions. Although anesthetics are essential to modern health care, many of the gases used are contribute to the greenhouse effect and are far more powerful than carbon dioxide. The medical community says alternatives are available for those with the highest global warming potentials. This bill initiates a study by the Department of Ecology in conjunction with the Department of Health to assess the use of these, their greenhouse potentials, leading to a guidance document for healthcare usage.

SB 5359\HB 1328 Accelerating the development of clean energy and transmission. A complex bill establishing a Clean Energy Development Office within the Department of Commerce to provide information, plan, and support for clean energy projects and electric transmission facilities. It creates a work group to identify best practices and develop tools for siting and permitting large-scale battery energy storage systems, and requires Commerce to support to local governments integrating clean energy development into planning and zoning requirements under the Growth Management Act. As the transition to an energy system with net zero emissions encounters delays and resistance, the effort must increase to reach that goal.