With the spring legislative session in Springfield only a few days from adjournment, legislators are rushing to move bills up the chain for a final vote on the floor and passage. As they do so, it’s critical that lawmakers pay special attention to specific pieces of legislation that will have dire impact on their constituents.

Few bills will have potentially more negative effect than Senate Bill 1585, legislation pushed by utility giant Exelon and its northern Illinois affiliate ComEd under the guise of a bill that would help sustain jobs by saving the corporation’s nuclear plants in Clinton and the Quad Cities, and that would “help save customers’ money” through a new billing system called demand charge.

Both Exelon and ComEd have been intentionally obscure about the details of Senate Bill 1585, especially about the way the demand charge system works, and what its real impact will be.

Consumers need to ask themselves – and ask their legislators – if they would buy a product without knowing the price first. The answer would be: of course not!

And this is what Exelon and ComEd are attempting to do through Senate Bill 1585: impose something on consumers without allowing them to figure out for themselves – or without allowing regulatory bodies to chime in – whether this new type of billing would actually save them any money.

Under Senate Bill 1585, demand charges would be an additional component to your monthly bill, based upon your household’s one-time maximum kilowatt demand during a billing cycle. This charge is in addition to the current fixed monthly customer charges and the variable per kilowatt-hour charge which varies with usage.

Would residential customers be able to know when their maximum demand happens? No, residential customers have little ability to know what their maximum demand is or when it occurs. Proponents argue that customers could be trained to limit their household peak demand, but there is no evidence to support this argument. This has never been mandatorily applied to residential customers before – certainly never through a legislative mandate anywhere in the nation.

Without any proof of savings to the consumer, Senate Bill 1585 clearly goes in one direction: to have ratepayers pay the bill for a bailout at a time when Exelon is posting huge profits and should be able to modernize its nuclear plants out of its own pocketbook.

Affordable utilities are critical to working families, older residents living on fixed incomes and many other consumers struggling to make ends meet. And Exelon doesn’t really need a bailout. In fact, Exelon is doing quite all right for itself, making over $630 million in the first quarter of 2016. If we annualize it, we’re taking about $2 billion. Exelon can take care of their downstate plants without going to the legislature, much less taking it out of the wallets of working families and older residents who are struggling to pay their monthly bills.

In spite of Exelon’s claims that nobody really opposes Senate Bill 1585, several legislators are upset about the lack of details and obscure language, and besides AARP there is strong opposition from the Illinois attorney general, Citizen Action, the Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights, the Public Interest Research Group, the Public Asset Building Group, Woodstock Institute, and the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, among others.

Consumers need to speak up. We are asking people to write or call their legislators and urge them to oppose Senate Bill 1585. The last thing Illinoisans need is to get stuck with the bill for an Exelon bailout and higher energy bills.

Julie Vahling is an Associate State Director for Advocacy and Outreach with AARP Illinois. AARP Illinois has 1.7 million members in the state.