Ohio State Sen. Bill
Seitz doesn’t think his bill that would roll back Ohio’s renewable
energy mandates will suffer the same fate as it did last year.
This time he expects his bill to make it out of committee
and be signed into law.
“I can’t predict which approach will find favor, but
something will happen in calendar year 2014, immediately before or after
November elections,” the Republican from Cincinnati told a Monday morning
program on WCPN, Cleveland’s National Public Radio station.
Seitz was part of a panel of proponents and opponents the
radio program gathered to discuss his bill, which last week had its first hearing of 2014 after
being shelved in late 2013 because of a lack of support.
Seitz re-introduced the bill because of new “devastating testimony” from an industry-sponsored study that
refuted a previous study that found flaws in Seitz’s bill. The person who
conducted that survey, Jonathan
Lesser, president of Continental Economics Inc., was on the radio program
along with Seitz.
The senator has been outspoken in his support for bills to
either alter or remove Ohio’s renewable energy mandates that passed with large
bipartisan support in 2008. Seitz supported that bill when it passed because it
included “a number of things that were meritorious.” But he told WCPN that it
was shoehorned late into a comprehensive bill.
He has compared the 2008 law’s mandate to those passed by
Soviet Union dictator Josef
Stalin’s government, and he didn’t back away from the comparisons in
Monday’s discussion. When host Mike
McIntyre asked about Seitz’s comparisons to the Soviet Union, he said:
“It is worse than a five-year plan because it is a plan that runs from 2008
through 2025. He added: “These mandates were passed in 2008 on a series of
assumptions which, like Stalin’s five-year plans, have proven to be
spectacularly false.”
Those assumptions, Seitz said, were that Ohio would need
more generating plants that would be expensive to build, and were made without
knowledge that Ohio and other states in the U.S. would discover vast amounts of
natural gas in shale rock that would lower energy prices.
The 2008 law says that by 2025 electric companies must
provide 25 percent of their electricity supply from alternative energy
resources, and 12.5 percent of that 25 percent must be from renewable energy.
It also requires energy providers to reduce consumers’ electricity usage by 22
percent by 2025.
Seitz’s law does not advocate cancelling those mandates,
although he previously voiced support for a bill that would remove those mandates.
Instead, one of the more prominent facets of the bill would
freeze the renewable energy benchmarks where they are at now instead of
incrementally increasing to 12.5 percent in 2025. Senate Bill 58 also explores
eliminating the in-state requirement for renewable energy generation, which
Seitz says is unconstitutional. Seitz also favors allowing the largest
industrial customers, such as AK
Steel Holding Corp. and the Timken
Co., to opt-out of paying an energy efficiency surcharge in exchange for
relinquishing any benefits existing law might give them. Seitz said these large
companies compete globally, including in states and countries without mandates,
and do not need government decrees to save energy.
“We have every incentive to save energy because we’re using
most of it,” Seitz told WCPN. “We don’t need government.”
Seitz said the bill is changing and he isn’t sure which
approach will find favor with legislators.
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