Gov. John Kasich chose a New Hampshire town hall meeting to warn Ohio GOP lawmakers that if they try to permanently gut the state's energy efficiency programs and wind and solar requirements, the state will return to its original even tougher standards because "I am not playing around with this."
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Gov. John Kasich warned Ohio GOP lawmakers during a presidential campaign stop this week in The Granite State that he will not stand for them to gut the state's law's requiring electric utilities to provide energy efficiency programs for customers and to sell more green power.
"Some wanted to basically...stop the development of solar and wind and even efficiency standards," he said of Senate Bill 310 approved with heavy utility backing last spring freezing clean energy and efficiency standards while lawmakers "studied" the issue.
At Kasich's insistence, the bill also contained a catch -- that if lawmakers could not come up with a compromise after spending more time looking at the issues, the original, much tougher standards would automatically come back in January 2017.
The legislative study committee created by the bill convened to look further into the matter and came to the conclusion last fall that the freeze should remain indefinitely or at least until the fate of President Obama's Clean Power Plan was determined.
"That's not acceptable," Kasich told the small New Hampshire crowd asking him questions at a town hall meeting. "We need to drive efficiency in this country. We should have been doing it ... 40 years ago.
"Of course we like solar. And we like wind.
"And solar prices have come down dramatically. We are going to have the development of solar and wind, and if the legislature wants to gut it, then I am going to go back to the goal that we had, which was unpalatable. I am not playing around with this," he said.
Those "unpalatable" goals, voted for by all but one lawmaker back in 2008, were that by 2025, 25 percent of the power sold in Ohio would have to be generated by "alternative" technologies -- 12.5 percent, or half, by green technologies such as wind and solar, and the other half by newly designed nuclear reactors or "clean coal," a complicated technology that so far has proven to be very expensive.
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