Illinois Shines Publishes Stakeholder Feedback on Proposed Advance of Capital Evaluation Criteria

The EEC category includes Distributed Generation projects as well as community solar projects that have been submitted to the Program by Equity Eligible Contractor Approved Vendors per the guidelines specified in Section 7.7.3. At least 10% of the capacity of Illinois Shines shall come from projects submitted by applicants that are EEC certified. EEC certified Approved Vendors may also submit projects into other program categories and are not limited to the EEC category. To give the market for EEC projects time to develop, for the 2022-2023 and the 2023-2024 delivery years the Agency does not propose increasing the portion Illinois Shines allocated to EEC projects above the 10% level, but expects that in the next Long-Term Plan which will cover the subsequent two delivery years, the Agency will begin to increase that percentage with the goal of reaching 40% by the 2030 delivery year.

On January 31, 2023, the Illinois Power Agency announced the launch of the Energy Workforce Equity Portal at energyequity.illinois.gov. The portal may be used by employers to connect to job seekers, register as a clean energy company, and post jobs, and by job seekers to connect to employers, explore jobs, and apply to become Equity Eligible Persons. This site includes an Equity Investment Eligible Community Map to help identify if communities and individuals reside in an identified equity investment eligible community.

For assistance in this project category, contact the Equity Eligible Contractor Sector Strategist, Conner Rettig, at [email protected] or the Program Administrator team at [email protected].