Illinois’ clean energy law, meant to decarbonize the state’s power generation industry, has a loophole so large you could drive a flatbed truck through it.
We wrote a little over a week ago about how one power-plant owner has reacted to Illinois’ heavy-handed Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, or CEJA, by literally extracting six turbines from a large natural gas-fired plant in Will County and transporting them — by, yes, flatbed trucks — to Texas, where they will continue to run and support growing electricity demand in that state.
That facility, Elwood Energy, is the largest gas-fired “peaking” plant in northern Illinois (and perhaps the country). It was required under CEJA to be shuttered by 2030. Facing that deadline, the previous owner last year sold the facility in two pieces.
Six of the nine turbines at the site went to Bethesda, Maryland-based Hull Street Energy, which responded to the law’s strictures by making the audacious Texas move. Those six turbines together generate up to 900 megawatts when needed — about the same output produced by one of Constellation Energy Group’s northern Illinois nuclear reactors.
Myriad unintended consequences are flowing from the law’s foolish 2030 mandate to close a sizable number of the gas-fired plants that are critical to keeping Chicagoland’s lights on during summer heat waves and polar vortexes.
Today, we’re zeroing in on another pernicious CEJA effect, one that relates to the three remaining turbines at the Elwood site, along with other similarly critical facilities in our region.
Dairyland Power Cooperative, a power generator based in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has scooped up gas-fired plants throughout the area at what we are told are cut-rate prices. By virtue of these transactions, Dairyland will be able to operate these power stations until 2045, not 2030.
Why? Because CEJA’s 2030 closure mandate applies only to facilities owned by privately held companies and exempts plants owned by municipal utilities and other nonprofit enterprises. Dairyland is a nonprofit, generating power mainly for household and business customers of power distribution cooperatives serving much of the western half of Wisconsin. Dairyland thus is shielded from CEJA’s 2030 closure requirement applying to a select group of these gas-fired peakers and must abide instead by CEJA’s 2045 deadline applying to most other Illinois power stations burning fossil fuels.
In the 2021 debate over the landmark law — a measure that Gov. JB Pritzker considers a signature achievement as he mulls a presidential run — Springfield clearly made a good-guys-versus-bad-guys distinction between privately held power generation companies and nonprofit operators. But if addressing climate change was the aim, it shouldn’t have mattered who owns the power plants. They emit the same carbon either way.
In addition to that obvious policy flaw, Springfield has another growing problem on its hands.
Scott Stantis editorial cartoon for Sun, Apr 26, 2026, on issues with Illinois’ clean-energy law. (Scott Stantis/For the Chicago Tribune)
In November 2025, a few months before acquiring its part of Elwood Energy in March, Dairyland purchased two other gas-fired peakers in west suburban Kane County: the 333-megawatt Rocky Road Energy Center in East Dundee and the 483-megawatt Elgin Energy Center. Under previous owner Avenue Capital Group, the plants would have had to close by 2030. With Dairyland now the owner, those plants can run until 2045.
That’s not all the bad news. It’s quite likely those two plants in the future will support the power needs of Dairyland customers outside of Illinois. Power industry sources tell us the juice from Elgin and Rocky Road could well fuel future data centers (of all things) in Wisconsin. Dairyland intends for the plants to support its end-use customers, and most of those aren’t in Illinois.
A Dairyland spokesperson tells us, “The facilities are not directed towards one project or industry; they are to provide capacity to meet the needs of growing demand across the board. Regarding the future use of energy from these resources, market conditions, including energy demand, and our members will determine the ultimate direction.”
Dairyland’s members — cooperatives that deliver electricity in mainly rural areas — are located in four upper Midwest states. Members include two cooperatives in Illinois, but the overwhelming majority are in Wisconsin. It’s a fair bet that much of the electricity from Rocky Road and Elgin ultimately will support demand in Illinois’ northern neighbor.
Those same power industry sources tell us at least two other northern Illinois natural gas plants subject to closure under CEJA are on the market now. If they’re sold, you can bet Dairyland or some other cooperative will be the acquirer; their output likely won’t be serving Chicago-area customers in the future
Here’s the reality increasingly emerging from CEJA’s ill-conceived targeting of gas-fired peakers: Carbon-emitting plants the law slates for near-term mothballing instead are remaining open for nearly two more decades. Meanwhile, Chicago-area power-delivery customers of Commonwealth Edison by and large soon won’t be benefiting any longer from the juice they generate. Instead, that electricity will support growing needs outside of Chicagoland, perhaps even from new data centers.
We’re hardly talking about marginal resources. The 450 megawatts still running at Elwood plus Elgin and Rocky Road’s combined 816 megawatts equal nearly 70% of what’s produced by Constellation’s Dresden nuclear energy station, just down the road from Elwood in Morris, Illinois. That 70% is enough power for about 980,000 homes.
The loss of this much capacity is likely to inflate the power costs for everyone in the ComEd market. Simply put, CEJA is giving us the worst of all worlds: The plants — and their emissions — remain, but consumers lose the benefit of having them.
Pritzker and his fellow Democrats need to amend CEJA quickly to close the loophole allowing electricity generated here to benefit people and businesses elsewhere. And they need to extend the 2030 closure deadlines to give state regulators more time to ensure we don’t prematurely lose generating facilities we’re going to need over the next several years to keep our electric bills from soaring.
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