Check’s not in the mail: Maryland energy bill rebate won’t come until August or later

Maryland households will have to wait just a little bit longer for a promised rebate on their energy bills amid the summer heat.

While legislative leaders had said they expected the first payments in July, the Maryland Public Service Commission said Friday that the first round of rebates to all residential energy customers is expected in August or September. A second round is anticipated in either January or February.

Total payments are expected to average about $80 per household for the year.

PSC Chair Fred Hoover said the commission spoke with utilities — which will actually dole out the rebates to customers — as well as ratepayer advocates and its own staff, to come up with the best plan for handing out the money.

The commission “has selected a plan that will allow for the most equitable, efficient and timely distribution of refunds to provide relief to customers, particularly those most affected by bill increases this past winter,” Hoover wrote.

The refund payments will show up as credits on ratepayers’ bills and will be based on a customer’s usage over a year, with those who use more energy getting a larger rebate. But the PSC also directed utilities to disburse 25% of the money evenly across all ratepayers, to ensure all customers get a baseline amount.

The PSC also advised utilities to advertise ways for customers to donate their rebate to others if they choose, including to the Fuel Fund of Maryland or SMECO’s Members Helping Members program. For the winter rebate, utilities were told to explore ways that customers could refuse the rebate and send it instead to other customers who receive bill assistance from the state.

The rebates were authorized by legislators as part of the Next Generation Energy Act, a wide-ranging bill that also included a regulatory fast-track for new power plants and other energy infrastructure in the state.

Lawmakers tapped $200 million to pay the rebates from the Strategic Energy Investment Fund, which utilities pay into if they do not purchase a specified amount of renewable energy for their portfolios. The fund has ballooned in recent years.

During a news conference Wednesday, Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) referenced this week’s high temperatures, which flirted with 100, and their impact on already soaring bills.

“I have an HVAC repair person coming tomorrow,” Ferguson said. “So we are personally dealing with the challenges of what I know a number of Maryland families are, which is unbelievably hot weather, and then the resultant impact on people’s bills, which feels like a double hit. I am as frustrated as anyone.”

High utility bills were a major topic of conversation for the 2025 legislature, following high costs during a cold winter, thanks in large part to higher natural gas distribution rates. But now, electricity rates are poised to increase as well for the delivery year that began in June.

The increases will hit different customers at different times: June 1 for SMECO customers, August for Pepco and Delmarva Power customers, and October for Potomac Edison. BGE, which will have the highest increases, was ordered by the PSC to spread them over three months this fall and again next spring, in order to dull the impact in the high-use summer and winter periods.

Moore signed the Next Generation bill and one other energy bill, but vetoed the Energy Resource Planning Act, which would have set up an in-house energy planning office for state government. He recently critiqued the Next Generation law, saying it did not go far enough to attract power generators to build in Maryland.

“We introduced legislation this year that would have allowed more nuclear into the state, that would have allowed nuclear to be seen as a clean energy source, which it is,” Moore said. “I’m proud of the work we did in partnership with the legislature, but I want to be crystal clear: It did not go far enough.”

Ferguson pushed back this week.

“I don’t know what the governor was talking about when he said that. I genuinely have no idea what he was referencing,” Ferguson said during his news conference. “I think that we did incredibly important work to make it easier for all sorts of cleaner energy, from natural gas to wind to solar to geothermal to batteries.”

He said Moore’s nuclear bill would have increased costs for ratepayers, which “was not something that we were going to tolerate. So, what we did was incorporate components of the governor’s bill into the Next Generation Act.”

The bill directs state agencies to pursue nuclear cost-sharing agreements with neighboring states and agreements with federal agencies about nuclear siting, including for small modular reactors.

The fiscal note for Moore’s bill said that “in the short term, the bill appears likely to increase electricity rates,” because it increased the amount utilities would have to pay the state to comply with a solar energy goal. It also established a nuclear energy procurement mechanism that would be funded by ratepayers.

But legislative analysts said the governor’s bill had “the potential to provide other benefits to the broader energy market and eventually reduce associated electricity rates paid by customers in the State.”

Ferguson was also quick to note that increasing power generation in the state isn’t a cure-all. Maryland is part of a 13-state region whose electrical grid is controlled by PJM Interconnection, which has been criticized for policies that make it difficult for new power sources — particularly renewable — to come online at a time of surging demand.

“Generation is a problem within the PJM territory, for all 13 states, and even in states that are net exporters, that generally are sending their energy to other states,” Ferguson said. “This, sadly, is not a problem that we can fix in a day, a week or a month.”