The Ohio Senate voted unanimously Wednesday to pass an extensive bill lawmakers and lobbyists have said will prompt new energy generation and otherwise overhaul the system as power-intensive consumers, namely data centers, put increasing pressure on the grid statewide.
The effort, and a related one in the House through House Bill 15, moves as the state stares down eventual electric shortages from growing demand, which the Ohio Business Roundtable has forecasted could come as soon as two years from now.
Senate Bill 2 addresses a range of related issues, including energy costs for consumers, reliability and barriers to entering the market for utilities, Sen Bill Reineke (R-Tiffin) said.
“That growth needs energy,” Reineke said Wednesday.
The priority legislation piece, which was amended over and over before it went to the Senate floor, ends direct subsidies to some solar power projects and also controversial ones to two Ohio Valley Electric Cooperative power plants.
“One of which is in Indiana, for gosh sakes,” Sen. Kent Smith (D-Euclid) said.
Those coal bailouts were enacted under House Bill 6 in 2019, the legislative portion of a nuclear power bailout scandal that led to numerous federal convictions and indictments, including landing Republican former House Speaker Larry Householder and former Ohio Republican Party Chair Matt Borges in federal prison.
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Smith said he believes SB 2 is making a strange case for term limits, too.
“As less of the General Assembly had to defend their House Bill 6 vote, some sensibility kind of began to get baked into the process,” Smith said. “It’s for the benefit of, everyday Ohioans.”
The bill makes dozens of other changes to electric law. It eliminates a transmission tax on projects that plan to generate new energy, Reineke said, and lowers it otherwise.
SB 2 also establishes a shot clock, hastening turnaround time for regulatory decisions by the Ohio Power Siting Board. Reineke said he believes Ohio can't lag behind California and New York.
Under the bill, utility distributors would also be required to come before another regulatory board, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO), and make their case for their rates every three years. And senators voted to get rid of riders—or fees utilities quietly tack onto consumer bills—without PUCO review and authorization.
“Utilities were using it to say, well, ‘I'm going to add this one-off additional charge to your bill, it’s only 50 cents. Then there'll be another one. ‘Well, it's only a quarter.’ Well, it got so bad that there were to 50 riders on at least one utility's service bills,” said Todd Snitchler, an energy lobbyist and former regulator and state lawmaker.
Snitchler believes the legislation being worked on has something in it for everyone, he said in an interview Wednesday.
“As long as people don’t get greedy,” he said. “If you give the generators the ability to compete against each other to deliver the electrons, that’s where they need to be, if you keep the utilities in the wires business in a way that is accountable to the PUCO and to their customers, that’s a win for them, and in the end it’s a win for consumers because they’re going to have better line of sight into their bills.”
Major utility providers, including FirstEnergy and American Electric Power (AEP) of Ohio, have been the biggest opponents so far. Lawmakers, so far, don’t seem to want to give in to them, Snitchler said.
Some environmental advocates have also voiced concerns with SB 2 and HB 15. Meanwhile, the bills’ proponents cover a swath of interests, from other environmental advocates to the Ohio Consumers Counsel to the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association.
SB 2 is off to the House. House lawmakers are continuing to consider and change their own bill, which includes similar ideas. HB 15 could get a vote as soon as Wednesday morning.
