COLUMBUS — Ohio’s two aging nuclear power plants have plenty of life left in them and it would prove more economical to keep them running than if the state had to bring other sources of clean electricity online to meet future demand, a pair of experts said Wednesday.
Co-authors of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study on the value of nuclear energy nationally and internationally told lawmakers that the plants’ economic value goes beyond what they can get for the electricity they produce.
“We need solar and wind, but we also need something that is dispatchable and controllable,” Jacopo Buongiorno, of MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, told the state House Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
The study suggests that nuclear power does and will continue to play an important role in providing low carbon-emission power nationally and could provide a hedge for future uncertainty over demand, natural gas prices, and environmental regulation. There was next to no discussion about the nuclear waste generated by the plants.
Lawmakers are expected to again consider whether the state should preserve the Davis-Besse plant some 30 miles east of Toledo and the Perry plant 40 miles east of Cleveland.
FirstEnergy Solutions, the electricity supplier and owner of the plants, is now in bankruptcy proceedings. It has said it will close the two plants because it has been unable to compete economically with cheap and abundant natural gas.
The committee’s chairman, Rep. Nino Vitale (R., Urbana), said the Ohio Clean Energy Jobs Alliance, a coalition representing the Ottawa and Lake county communities where the plants are located, urged the panel to hear from the study’s authors. Davis-Besse is Ottawa County’s largest employer, with about 700 workers.
John Parsons, senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said a nuclear power plant cannot be switched back on once shut down.
“If you decide to stop operating these plants, they will be decommissioned,” he said. “They can’t be mothballed and maintained in case in a few years economic growth turns around and we believe that the circumstances have changed the value of these assets.”
The study suggests that quickly bringing other sources of reliable power online to meet a spike in demand or to meet future air emissions regulations could prove more expensive than keeping the plants in operation.
Davis-Besse is slated to close no later than May 31, 2020.
“The Sierra Club has been opposed to the bailout of these facilities for a number of years,” said Neil Waggoner, who is heading the organization’s Beyond Coal Campaign. “They are not needed for reliability and are expensive, and our focus should be on bringing true, clean renewable energy online, wind and solar, and growing these technologies rather than bailing out old costly nuclear plants.”
The study’s authors suggested that nuclear energy should be placed on equal footing with government policies that have supported the generation of renewable sources of power in recent years.
“I suspect that somebody is going to come up with some kind of bill,” Mr. Vitale said. “I’m leaning toward an energy market that allows fair competition … No matter where you stand on green energy [or] not, carbon emissions [or] not, global warming [or] not, all of us can agree on one thing, and that is we don’t want to breathe dirty air.”
So far, lawmakers have been reluctant to enact customer subsidies or force a captive market for the plants’ more expensive power.
Guy Parmigian, superintendent of the Benton-Carroll-Salem School and an alliance member, said the conversation seems to have changed with the selection of House Speaker Larry Householder (R., Glenford) and Gov. Mike DeWine. But he remains nervous because time is running short for Davis-Besse.
“I respect that the experts who are now in the legislature today to figure it out, but we’re talking about 1,400, 1,500-plus jobs,” he said. “If we were looking to attract 1,500 jobs, we would pull out all the stops to do that. This is about saving these jobs.”
First Published February 27, 2019, 11:05 p.m.
