The U.S. today has a massive glut of excess generating capacity. Coal plants in Ohio are used less than half of the time, far below the national average, which in turn is 27 percent below its peak in 2008. The U.S. is more than 20 percent of the way to meeting the Clean Power Plan, which won’t be enforced for five more years.
Four nuclear plants are being built at two U.S. locations. Both projects are wildly out of control and will require massive subsidies in order to operate. Both the Georgia and South Carolina plants will need to sell power at four times the cost for which wind power is presently selling in Ohio.
In Ohio, that power couldn’t be sold in our competitive market, but Georgia and South Carolina are captive to politically influenced lawmakers and regulators. One Ohio utility wants to return to those days.
Several radical changes affect the electric industry today. Cheap natural gas and the 2008 recession drove down total electricity consumption and coal consumption. Growing utility energy efficiency programs and plummeting windpower costs have kept consumption low as the economy recovers, stabilized the cost of electricity, and shifted the economic contest from one that pits coal against natural gas to one which pits both of them against wind.
In the last two years, utility-scale solar power has become cheaper than new natural gas.
A single unit of nuclear power produces three times as much output as a single unit of windpower. But a few thousand wind turbines achieve the same reliability as coal and natural gas, while the wind power KWh costs less than a quarter as much as a KWh from a new nuclear plant.
At the current rate of growth of wind and solar generation we can easily replace half of all today’s coal and nuclear generation before a single new nuclear plant could be sited and built. Expansion of wind and solar puts the U.S. squarely on track to do exactly that by 2024, as long as efficiency programs aren’t reduced.
Ohio would be on that track, too, except that Republican lawmakers catering to fossil and nuclear industries have blocked cheap efficiency, wind and solar advances here. Gov. Kasich vetoed a bad law proposed last December, but Republican legislators are planning more attacks on our wallets.
Now the Cleveland, Toledo and Youngstown utilities cannot operate their aging and dangerous nuclear plants without hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. The PUCO gave them $200 million per year for the next three years, but that’s not enough. They want to reverse the competitive forces in Ohio’s deregulated electric industry so they can raise rates that much for the long run. The other utilities in Ohio see this as a blank check being given by government to a single special interest, so they are asking for similar deals for aging coal plants which they don’t need.
Does Ohio need a Republican-sponsored corporate welfare state for failing power plants? Or do we need to make an even playing field for all forms of energy, where efficiency, wind and solar are winning? Ohio has enough wind potential to produce five or six times as much wind power as we need, and a similar capability for utility-scale solar – at today’s electric costs or lower.
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