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Krc DE talk station. Very happy Wednesday too, Donald and Neil Americans for Prosperity can give us the info and low down on Ohio's energy bill which apparently is coming up for a vote. Dona, what's the story on this one?
Well, yeah, you know, we've had for a number of years, and I've been on your show talking about it. Brian, the many, many bad ideas coming out of Columbus when it comes to energy policy.
Continuing a theme bad ideas, anyway, go ahead, there you go.
But there's some good stuff on the horizon, right And we missed something we had heard a lot from folks, and we had actually released a study alongside the Buckeye Institute earlier this year outlining better energy policy for Ohio.
The good news is today, yesterday the Senate voted out of commenial send of the floor today a bill from the House to increase energy generation here in the state, eliminate subsidies and make it easier and more accessible to the marketplace for both consumers and the way that the energy distribution utilities make their their rates. That we pay on our utility bills. Ideally that goes to the House later today and we'll have this to the Governor's desk
here in the coming weeks assigned into law. It's the biggest in twenty five years since the deregulation efforts of the late nineties. One of the most free market piece of legislation on energy policy the state has seen in a quarter of a decade. And we're really excited to see this thing follow through and move.
By the end of the day to day. Well kind of to the chase. What does this mean for the rate payers or what do you anticipate this will mean for ratepayers?
Well, right out of the gate, we're going to eliminate subsidies that you're paying on your bill eighty million dollars according to the Manufacturers Association of State of Ohio, eighty million dollars this year's forecasted if these subsidies remained in place, that rate payers you and I Brian on our home util bills would be paying in.
For what kind of what kind of activities, what subs What is being subsidized.
So it's being subsidized. Are two coal plants, one in the state of Ohio. I understand in the state of Indiana that are held over from Cold War era that we continue to subsidize through what's going as the OVX subsidies that we're at the heart of the Hospital six scandal.
Interesting, So a subsidy is something that that's that runs along with obviously runs along with the money we pay for the power generation. I mean, aren't we already paying for the power generation? Why do they need to be subsidized? And I guess how did this thing end up hanging around for so many years and decades?
Actually, well, like a lot of pieces of energy, and the way that energy policy has often been done right is that we'll, you know, assettle, lawmakers will identify a favored energy generation. Our friends in the left love wind and solar, some of our friends on the right love
big nuclear and coal. And that what when I say all that, right, I'm not slashing any one of those, I'm slashing the idea that, hey, in order to do energy policy, I have to do good for my friends and the other guys be damned, right.
I gotcha.
In this case, what we're doing is saying, let's create a fair market, let's not subsidize one favorite industry over the other. Let's let the market decide and consumers will win.
All right. Now, I note in the notes that this legislation will ensure market forces and not bureaucrats and utility lawyers decide energy prices. That means there's going to be some semblance of reality related to how much it costs to generate the power to what we're going to be paying for it.
That's right well, And part of what this does is when we deregulated back in the late nineties, the idea was is that the distribution utilities, the duke energy is the first energy is the world AP's of the world would go out to the market and build their service offerings based around real world prices. But they failed to do that because they're clever and they they're they're looking out for their bottom line, and so they went out and they started creating doing it in other ways and
working with the regulators to do that. This makes very clear that the only way State of Ohio you can determine energy prices is through market rate offers, market service offers. And so what that's going to enable us to do, right is really see the real price of energy and what it's going to cost to get it delivered to our homes, ensuring that again the market decides and consumers win well.
And finally, I note that it's supposed to be it'll speed up new energy generation in Ohio. And I'm one of those big fans of modular nuclear plants, and I've already talked with the veak Ramaswami about his perception of nuclear and he embraces it wholeheartedly and believes that we should be the number one, you know, a state in the Union for modular nuclear because it provides consistent, reliable,
carbon free energy if people care about carbon. I don't know why we've always stood in the way of these moving forward on this. Are we going to be able to have that and will it be able to be actually an achievable goal or is this just something that's going to be put on paper and delayed for decades.
Well, I think that's the idea. One of the things here, right, I think we've got to remember is there's a couple of layers. You've got the state and then you've got the federal government. Right that we've got to work through
on the state level. This solves that problem. We still need the federal government in the Trump administration in Congress to do some of its work to make sure that we can approve things like like like these small modular nuclear reactors and most importantly, improvem in a timely manner. Here in Ohio. What I think we got that's going for us on that front is they speed up the
power sighting board process. If you want to put a small modular clear reactor in one of these identified brownfield zones, they're going to be to get an answer on that within forty five days. So you're waiting three years, Yeah, forty five days the bureaucrats have to get you an answer back. In other cases it's less than a year. And so the legislature is making very clear you can't
slow walk new projects. You really get if this generation is the application is complete and filed, you've got to give these folks an answer, as well as lowering tangible personal property taxes to make sure that you know, folks are incentivized to build their energy projects here in Ohio,
not in other states. And so I think this sends a big signal and makes all how a big bright shining light and saying, hey, if we need if we're going to need to solve our energy generation problem in this country to handle the jobs we're trying to bring back to this country. Ohio is the place to cite your energy projects, and we're going to do it in a free market manner that rewards puts consumers at the top of the pyramid, not energy companies.
Well I like that, Okay, So forty five days to approve it or deny it. Now, if they fail to approve within forty five days and get provided answers, that means it's automatically approved. Is it the default that that will be approved? Because I know, in spite of the rules and what are they're obligated to do, quite often they ignore them. Maybe they're gonna have to run into
court to get a decision made. Or is there is it built in there that it's just going to be approved that they failed to do it in a timely fashion.
My understanding is that if the if the regulators fail to act, the project will be defaulted to an approval.
Good.
So this keeps these things moving, and that's that's the idea. And you think about things like the Keystone Excel pipeline, right, that's constantly a topic of debate in national politics. The problem there was you have one party in power for a couple of years who slow walk it, and the other who tries to get it done, and then they slow walk. Their parties switch and they slow walk it.
We just need to make these decisions, Brian, so that we can get energy, you know, energy generation onto the grid and running oh other thing on the micro on the small modular reactors behind the meter. So there's going to be increased opportunities for folks like the big data centers that are large consumers of energy to create their own energy generation without putting taxpayers on the hook.
Good.
The other problem we see there is getting interconnected into PGM, And so if we can speed up the ability for data centers or other big users to generate their own energy, they can get their energy online, get their jobs going, get their production moving, and then figure out the interconnection to PGM so the rest of the grid can access that energy down the line. I think that's important again to one protect rate payers and two speed up the necessary generation of new energy we want in the state.
Yeah, they have the demand. If they can be free to generate that electricity, you know, the general population is probably going to be able to glom onto that because they don't need all electricity generated by a small nuclear reactor. I mean, that's sound policy right there, Donovan and Neil, Americans for Prosperity. What is anything we can do to help this process along? Or is it a foregone conclusion at this point?
Well, we're hoping it's a foregone conclusion, and that's rare, right, Usually we're fighting bad ideas, but we believe this is going to move through today. What we're gonna need listeners to do is once this gets done later today, we're gonna have a call to action to thank your lawmakers because they've been up against a lot of heavy pressure from the utilities. So we're gonna have folks reaching out
to thank lawmakers. I'll follow back up next time I'm on the show and give folks that call to action.
If that's all right with you, No, that's wonderful. Praise them when they're doing the right job, and give them hell all the time when they're doing the wrong job, because nine times out of ten it falls into the latter category, which is why we have Americans for Prosperity. Donald and Neil, keep up the great work. I'll look forward to our conversation next week. My friend Brian always going to be with you. Seven to fifty one here
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So you had a solid retirement dream.
So