(COLUMBUS, OH) -- Ohio’s controversial law approved this
week to weaken, and eventually, kill a renewable electricity mandate program
represents a departure from a recent trend of states increasing the ambition of
their policies to combat climate change.
“Its adoption underscores some of the political challenges
states face in transitioning toward more carbon-friendly electricity sources,”
Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told
me.
Senior Political Correspondent David Drucker on the expanded
Washington Examiner magazine
Climate change mitigation advocates, researchers, and public
policy experts tell me they don’t expect other states to follow Ohio’s lead,
but any backtracking could hamper attempts to reach 100% clean electricity.
“It’s not necessarily that we will see a trend of RPS
rollbacks,” said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of environmental politics
at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who is writing a book on
state renewable portfolio standards. “But to have 100% clean electricity by
2050, we need to be growing renewables by percentage points each year. Repeals
are the worst of all scenarios, but it’s just a manifestation of another trend,
which is delay. We are behind.”
Why Ohio law is unique: Ohio’s law — approved by the state’s
Republican-led legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine — is truly
unprecedented, and had been years in the making, pushed by politically
influential bankrupt utility FirstEnergy Solutions.
Its core purpose is to subsidize uneconomic nuclear and coal
plants, but in addition to doing that, it takes away money from renewable
electricity and efficiency mandates. It shrinks Ohio’s renewable portfolio
standard goal of 12.5% to 8.5% and cancels the program after 2026.
Other states, such as Illinois, New York, and New Jersey,
have also implemented programs to compensate nuclear plants to keep them
running, but those Democratic-leaning states have done so for climate change
reasons, given nuclear’s zero-carbon value. Those states have simultaneously
increased renewable mandates as part of their nuclear aid.
More than half of the states, some of them Republican-led,
have adopted clean electricity standards or more restrictive renewable
portfolio standards.
“We consider Ohio an outlier of the broader trend in which
states are strengthening renewable mandates,” said Timothy Fox, vice president
at ClearView Energy Partners, a research group. “We don't expect this to
meaningfully change national renewable deployment.”
Ohio’s place in decarbonization efforts: Ohio was already a
clean energy laggard, with policies on the books hostile to building large wind
farms. It adopted its renewable electricity standard in 2008, passing
unanimously on Earth Day. But in 2014, Republican backlash prompted Ohio to
become the first state to freeze its renewable program (which lasted 2 years).
Republican-controlled states West Virginia and Kansas have also rolled back
renewable standards, but the West Virginia program was voluntary, and Kansas is
already generating plenty of electricity from wind.
Ohio is the second-worst state in the country for renewable
electricity generation, at 2.5% in 2018, according to the Energy Information
Administration.
Ohio is the third-largest coal consuming state in the
country, although natural gas has increased its share of the state’s
electricity lately. It is one of the nation’s top emitters of carbon dioxide
from the power sector, a fact that stands to get worse from the new law
subsidizing coal plants, and gutting the renewable mandate, which experts say
would outweigh the emissions benefits of keeping the nuclear plants running.
“Ohio was never going to be leading the pack on renewable
energy,” said J.R. Tolbert, vice president of state policy at Advanced Energy
Economy. “But what matters about Ohio is that it one of the leading emissions
states, and this legislation isn't going to help that.”
