HB2249 – Studying the impact of including general market participants in all the auctions of allowances for the Climate Commitment Program.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Dye (R; 9th District; Pomeroy)
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Environment & Energy  on January 25th. Still in committee at cutoff.
Next step would be – Dead
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Summary
The bill would require the Washington State Institute for the Study of Public Policy to publish a report on any impacts that including general market participants in the auctions has on allowance prices. (These are the 40% of current participants in the market that don’t actually have any covered emissions or compliance obligations. They can be buying allowances and retiring them to voluntarily offset emissions that the program doesn’t cover, for example, or trading them to speculate on prices.) The Institute would update its evaluation and report again to the Legislature every other year as long as general market participants were allowed in the auctions.

After each auction Ecology would have to publish the number of allowances purchased by each entity registered with the department as a general market participant. It would also publish
the percentage of the auctioned allowances purchased by general market participants, and the percentage of the auctioned allowances they’d purchased over that compliance period. After the conclusion of each compliance period, the department would also publish:
(i) The total number of retired compliance instruments that were, at one time during the compliance period, held by general market participants;
(ii) The proportion of compliance instruments that were, at one point prior to retirement, held by a general market participant, relative to the total number of allowances retired during that compliance period;
(iii) The number of transactions of compliance instruments involving at least one general market participant as a buyer or seller;
(iv) A rank-ordered list of the most active general market participants, numbered in descending order based on the number of transactions each general market participant participated in during the preceding compliance period; and
(v) The average gross profit margin, positive or negative, of the compliance instrument sales by each general market participant during the preceding compliance period.

(I’m quoting this list, because I’m not sure whether “at one time” is supposed to mean the number at the point in time when the total was largest or the cumulative total of those held at any time during the period. I’m also not sure if “compliance instruments” just means allowances here; offsets are “compliance instruments” too, but I don’t think they’re traded in the auctions… I think that (i) is simply supposed to mean the number of allowances that general market participants bought and then retired during the period, and that (ii) is simply supposed to mean the percentage of the allowances retired during the period that a general market participant held at some point, but I wouldn’t swear to either of those readings.)

The bill also authorizes Ecology to release confidential information needed for the study to the Institute, but it requires the Institute to treat it as confidential too.