Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - Edition #73

It’s Not Over

Gov. Mike DeWine recently signed legislation (HB 6) that subsidizes dirty coal plants, bails out uneconomic reactors and guts Ohio’s clean energy programs. Spurred by an aggressive lobbying campaign by utility and coal interests, Ohio legislators gave in and sadly doubled down on old, expensive technologies while abandoning investments in innovation.
Yes, the bill is horrible, but Ohio’s Constitution allows voters to review and overturn bad laws. If enough signatures are obtained in the next 90 days, HB 6 will be stayed—meaning it doesn’t go into effect—until Ohioans have their say on a potential referendum question on the ballot during the November 2020 election.
Stayed tuned.

Buying a Bailout

FirstEnergy Solutions and its allies spent more than $60 million to obtain this $1.1 billion bailout from Ohio legislators. According to data compiled by the Energy and Policy Institute, FES and its employees gave nearly $1 million to legislators, other officeholders, candidates and political parties prior to passage of the bill.
Don’t they call that “buying a bailout?”
Rather than earn money the traditional way (which it wasn’t able to do, as evidenced by it being in bankruptcy), FES and its Wall Street owners see political contributions and lobbyists as investments, from which they stand to earn a whopping 1,700% return. 
Don’t freemarket advocates refer to such political giveaways as “corporate cronyism?”

Bogus Math

Bailout backers admit HB 6 is a bailout, but claim it benefits ratepayers, not FirstEnergy. As the Columbus Dispatch succinctly put it: “Hogwash.” The newspaper exposes Rep. Bill Seitz – whom it calls “an implacable foe of environmental protection who likes to use words like ‘enviro-nazi’”— as the chief proponent of this bogus claim. Bogus Bill seems to forget that the bill gives $1.1 billion to a profitable company while it guts efficiency measures that reduce the energy bills of Bob and Betty Buckeye. 
What Bogus Bill also ignores is that the real bailout beneficiaries are the gambling WallStreethedge funds that bought the troubled FES and invested in campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists in order to earn a 1,700% return on their “investment.”
Criticizing the false claims of Rep. Seitz, the Dispatch concludes: “The real cost of HB 6 is in the giant backward step it takes, for Ohio’s economy and for a cleaner future. It props up two uncompetitive plants with a history of bad business decisions and ensures that Ohio will fall behind other states that are building new industries around renewable energy.”
 

Greed is Spreading

After peppering Ohio legislators with “hogwash,” FES turned its attention to West Virginia, where it spent enough money to convince those legislators to convene a special session and provide a $12.5 million tax break to FES owned Pleasants Power Station, a dirty, old and uneconomic coal-fired power plant. 
FES’s high-priced lobbyist also snuck a provision into the Ohio budget that allows the company to change the year by which it accounts for its decoupling efforts, whereby it gets compensated for when its electricity sales fall. Rather than follow precedent and use the most recent year, FES changed the law so it could use 2018, the last year a giant General Motors factory was open and consumed a great deal of electricity. By shifting to 2018, the power giant gets paid for the electricity reductions caused by a GM plant closure. 

Couldn’t Have Said It Better

From Senator Joe Uecker, Republican from Ohio’s 14th district east of Cincinnati, during the Senate debate on HB 6:  
“The Ohio taxpayer should not be paying to prop up a private company just so New York investors can make more money than they are making now. … This bill puts 112,000 renewable energy jobs in jeopardy.”

Worth Repeating

Highlighting the irony of this “Clean Air Program,” Energywire reports that HB 6 allows FES to keep open a giant, dirty coal-fired power plant.

After lobbying to convince lawmakers to subsidize its Ohio nuclear plants because they produce most of the state's zero-carbon energy, Akron-based FirstEnergy Solutions said on Friday that an energy law enacted last week would also enable the company to keep 1,490 megawatts of coal-fired generation running at its W.H. Sammis plant near Stratton. The law, known as H.B. 6, will funnel subsidies to power plant owners.”