Using a procedural maneuver, Republican leaders in the Ohio House of Representatives last week stalled a bill to stop electric utilities from forcing Ohio consumers to bail out two costly coal-burning power plants, one of them in Indiana.
This parliamentary sleight of hand needs to be reversed.
According to the Office of Consumers’ Counsel, which represents residential utility ratepayers, Ohio electricity customers have so far paid almost $164 million in subsidies for the two historically money-losing generating stations.
The Ohio coal-burning plant, Kyger Creek, is in Cheshire, Gallia County, in the district of Republican House Speaker Jason Stephens of Kitts Hill. The other coal-burning plant, Clifty Creek, is in southeastern Indiana.
The plants were opened in 1955. Among multiple owners, the single largest is Columbus-based American Electric Power Co. (which fields 14 Statehouse lobbyists.) The two coal-burning plants were built to provide electricity for the federal government’s former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Southern Ohio, which enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
At issue at the Statehouse is House Bill 120, whose prime sponsors are Democratic Reps. Casey Weinstein of Hudson and Sean Brennan of Parma.
The Weinstein-Brennan bill would end the coal-plant bailout; and refund to Ohio electricity consumers what they’ve paid in subsidies so far; and forbid any revival of the subsidy by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
The subsidies were required by House Bill 6 of 2019, whose aims and passage formed part of the biggest public corruption scandal in Ohio’s 220 years of statehood. As a result of his efforts to pass HB 6, former House Speaker Larry Householder, a Perry County Republican, was convicted on federal charges and will be sentenced Thursday (June 29).
The House’s GOP-ruled Rules and Reference Committee, which Speaker Stephens chairs, at least temporarily stalled a potential House floor vote on the Weinstein-Brennan refund bill.
The Weinstein-Brennan bill had been stuck in the House’s utility friendly Public Utilities Committee since March 22. But the bill’s backers have been circulating a “discharge petition” to free the bill from the committee and send the measure directly to the House floor for an up or down vote.
Then, last Tuesday, with 22 of the required 50 House members’ petition signatures gathered, Stephens and the Rules and Reference panel, which he chairs, pulled the Weinstein-Brennan bill from Public Utilities and consigned it to Rules and Reference.
That will likely slow, for at least 30 days, any further action on repeal.
True, as a consequence of gyrations in fuel markets, Ohio’s coal-plant subsidies have, in the last year, let utilities give Ohio consumers tiny credits on their bills. “For now, customers are getting credit for a few cents per month,” Kathiann Kowalski of Energy News Network reported in October.
Supporters of the subsidy say that’s exactly how the coal-plant subsidy was supposed to work. Historically, though, the plants have been money-losers. So, Kowalski also reported, ratepayer subsidies for the coal plants will resume in July, with charges of 15 or 16 cents a month for AEP, AES Ohio and Duke residential ratepayers, and 4 cents a month for FirstEnergy residential consumers.
There’s no reason to think the thirst for subsidies will change, especially given the plants’ ages; that big electricity customers are increasingly seeking green energy; and that without subsidies, the two Ohio Valley Electric Corp. plants likely would have shut down already — as they should have. The fact is that OVEC’s owners made a bad bet and sought (and got) a bailout when Householder ruled the House.
The Weinstein-Brennan bill deserves a fair vote, and not procedural game-playing by the House’s GOP leaders. The OVEC subsidies violate the very free-market tenets that Statehouse Republicans say they support. Moreover, the OVEC subsidies were folded into HB 6 not because they are good policy but because they likely would gain support from other utilities for a bill that mainly benefited FirstEnergy.
This vestige of HB 6 needs to go.
Now.
And it will, if GOP leaders let the House, then the Senate, fairly and freely vote on Weinstein and Brennan’s proposal.
