COLUMBUS — FirstEnergy Solutions said Wednesday it may reconsider its plan to keep its two nuclear power plants on the shore of Lake Erie in operation because of the uncertainty over the fate of the state’s new bailout law.
“Unfortunately, any additional negative news from the courts or the successful submission of petitions to put a referendum on the ballot will destabilize the financial situation of those plants,” reads a statement released by the company.
“This will force the company to move back on a path to deactivation if alternative measures to provide needed financial support do not arise quickly,” it said.
This occurs as a petition effort seeks to subject House Bill 6 to a voter referendum on the November 2020 ballot.
Monday marks the deadline for petitions containing at least 266,000 valid signatures of registered voters to be filed with the secretary of state’s office. But the group behind it is in federal court seeking a deadline extension given the time it lost in getting the attorney general’s prior approval of petition language.
If the Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts is successful in getting the required signatures, it would prevent House Bill 6 from taking effect until at least the vote more than a year away.
The law would add a surcharge to electricity customers’s bills to create a $170 million-a-year fund — $150 million for the Davis-Besse plant in Oak Harbor and the Perry plant east of Cleveland and $20 million for five utility-scale solar fields, all but one in southern Ohio.
The nuclear plants directly employ about 1,400 people, but have been unable to compete economically against cheaper natural gas.
The law, slated to go into effect on Tuesday, separately adds surcharges to support coal-fired plants in southern Ohio and southeast Indiana owned by a multi-utility corporation dominated by American Electric Power.
FES had initially planned to begin the permanent decommissioning of Davis-Besse next May. It confirmed Wednesday that it did order fuel to keep the plant running. The next refueling outage is expected in early 2020.
The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday declined to expedite its consideration of FES’s lawsuit seeking to block the referendum from the 2020 ballot. It argues that the nuclear and solar surcharge is actually a tax and, therefore, not subject to referendum.
Referendum backers on Tuesday also filed briefs with U.S. District Court challenging the constitutionality of restrictions on petition efforts.
They include the requirement that such efforts get prior approval of the attorney general on the summary language that would be shown to potential petition signers. Attorney General Dave Yost rejected the first pass, forcing the group to rework the language and resubmit it.
It figures it lost 38 days of the 90 it had to file petitions before the law’s effective date. It wants a full 90 days to complete the process and keep House Bill 6 on ice.
“The backers of HB 6 have actively worked to deny Ohioans their First Amendment rights,” the group’s spokesman, Gene Pierce, said. “They've employed hundreds of blockers to stop voters from signing, started a phony petition drive to confuse Ohioans, bribed countless circulators to walk off the job, and run tens of millions of dollars in advertisements with phony claims and lies.”
U.S. District Court Judge Edmund Sargus on Friday granted the group a preliminary injunction preventing city prosecutors from enforcing what the group has contended is a state law requiring paid petition circulators to file forms containing personal information with the secretary of state’s office.
Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts has argued that supporters of the bailout law have used this information to track down circulators to harass and even bribe them.
The state has argued that the law applies only to managers and organizers of paid petition efforts and that individual signature gatherers do not have to comply. It maintains the group had over filed.
First Published October 16, 2019, 4:03 p.m.