Editor's note: This is part one of a three-part series "State of Energy" from WOSU. Look for part two tomorrow.
Ohio's often been a leader in the energy sector. The state's robust energy history helped create the first billionaire John D. Rockefeller and birthed Thomas Edison.
Ohio once led the country in oil production and was considered part of an emerging “Green Belt,” a rejection of the “Rust Belt” moniker the state adorned during the decline of manufacturing.
It may come as a surprise but in 2008 Ohio Republicans and Democrats came together with a goal: use renewable sources to generate 25% of the state’s electricity by 2025. It’s 2025, but the state generates renewable energy at only a fraction of that. About 5% of the energy used in Ohio comes from renewable sources.
WOSU's three-part State of Energy series explores what happened to Ohio’s renewable energy future and why it matters.
Many people WOSU interviewed for this series said the state’s energy dominance fell to corporate interests, and that former state lawmakers made laws to favor fossil fuels over renewable sources like solar and wind energy.
One of the state's former governors said the fossil fuel lobby and lawmakers "obliterated" much of the renewable industry in Ohio.
Despite those regulatory and legislative hurdles, solar energy has seen increased manufacturing in recent years. But restrictions have effectively stagnated the wind industry in the state.
Mark Shanahan is the former head of the Ohio Air Quality Development Authority. He served under Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland when lawmakers passed Strickland's 2008 bill.
“It's very frustrating how far ahead we could be,” Shanahan lamented. “Why don't you want to build [the solar] industry? So it's really frustrating to think of where we could have been had they not mugged it.”
The 2008 Clean Energy Law
Strickland's bill built on a 2006 bill supported by former Republican Gov. Bob Taft, who announced his "Energy Action Plan" that year to give a boost to the state's renewable sector.
Strickland lobbied lawmakers until he earned a nearly unanimous vote in support of the Clean Energy Law in 2008. The bill had two goals, create jobs and generate more renewable energy. The bill set the goal to generate 25% of energy in Ohio with renewable sources.
It looked like Strickland’s bill was working in 2010. Ohio climbed to second in the country in solar manufacturing.
The Great Recession had already begun, making job creation a top choice to mitigate its effects.
Part of the bill required at least half of the new renewable infrastructure to be manufactured in Ohio. This put Ohio at second in the country for solar panel manufacturing in 2010.
“He did a really good job of building this broad coalition,” Shanahan said about Strickland. “So when we actually made the official announcement of what his proposal was, he did it at a press conference with the head of the Ohio Manufacturers Association on one side and the head of the AFL-CIO on the other. And you never see them at a joint conference endorsing a piece of legislation together. It's pretty rare.”
Strickland’s clean energy bill did have opponents. FirstEnergy was the most notable among them, infamous for its aggressive lobbying and less than legal tactics, which earned the company a fine and deferred prosecution for its connection to the House Bill 6 scandal, which led to the imprisonment of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder.
Several people who spoke to WOSU said that the company would contract with lobbying firms only to make sure the firms couldn’t be used against the company’s interests.
Strickland was able to overcome FirstEnergy’s objections, at least at first.
“FirstEnergy suffered a defeat, perhaps the first defeat in their history in the state of Ohio because they, in large part, controlled what happened at the state house,” Strickland said. “They would come in and hire the lobbyists and pressure the legislators and they usually nearly always got their way.”
Ohio was heavily dependent on coal for energy when the bill passed. Coal powered 85% of the state’s electricity.
But the market started to shift. That put Strickland in a unique position to mold Ohio’s energy future.
“We were at the beginning, as I saw it, of the renewable energy revolution,” Strickland said.
In 2011, utility companies were meeting and exceeding renewable requirements.
But in 2023, Ohio ranked 47th nationwide for electricity generated using utility-scale renewables, extremely low for the state considering it ranked in 2009 as first in the nation by Site Selection magazine in alternative energy manufacturing.
But, Ohio’s sunny future in the renewable sector was derailed.
Shutting it down
New fossil fuel technology, more Republicans in the legislature, and a new era of political spending slowly killed the bill.
Strickland lost his re-election bid to Republican John Kasich.
The state shifted its attention to shale, and gutted the bill that had passed only a few years before with just one “no” vote.
Strickland said Ohio was “on the verge of really emerging as a major national leader in the production of wind and solar and other forms of energy.”
“They started turning back on our mandates, extending the timelines. The bottom line is today in Ohio, there are no significant mandates in place. They have been obliterated,” Strickland said.
Shanahan said the left turn put the state behind others and bolstered the grid as demands increase.
“This could have all been implemented already. You could have achieved all these things already,” Shanahan said.
The Rise of Fracking
Months after the Clean Energy Law went into effect, one of the world’s largest investment banks, the Lehman Brothers, declared bankruptcy and signaled the climax of the 2008 financial crisis. The crisis intensified the effects of the recession.
Then, a 2010 Supreme Court decision allowed the creation of super political action committees, or PACs. The nonprofit organizations don’t have to pay taxes and can collect donations nearly anonymously. That allowed a lot more money to enter the political arena.
The Tea Party movement started to gain traction around the country and here in Ohio. It didn’t have an official stance on renewable energy in 2010, but did oppose government spending and what the group viewed as “unnecessary” regulations.
Kasich used the bad economy to attack Strickland, and he aligned himself with the Tea Party. The movement’s popularity and the real financial hardships Ohioans were experiencing during the recession led to Kasich’s win over Strickland in 2010.
The Tea Party movement was funded heavily by David and Charles Koch, of Koch Industries. The company is a conglomerate that, among other industries, refines and distributes petroleum and natural gas. The Koch brothers championed pro-fracking and anti-climate change legislation on both the state and national level. They’ve donated to Kasich’s campaigns.
But, Kasich’s association with the Koch brothers didn’t stop him from breaking with popular conservative beliefs.
“I am a believer — my goodness I am a Republican — I happen to believe there is a problem with climate change. I don’t want to overreact to it, I can’t measure it all, but I respect the creation that the Lord has given us and I want to make sure we protect it,” Kasich said in a 2012 speech at an energy summit hosted by The Hill in Columbus.
But, Kasich said “we can’t overreact” to climate change, calling the Environmental Protection Agency’s policies aggressive and promised to continue to use coal as an energy source in the state.
A bill signed by Kasich in 2012 signaled the new energy era the state was entering. The bill promoted hydraulic fracturing, which had brand new technological advancements that would make the natural gas industry boom.
During the recession, the price of fossil fuels rose exponentially and shifted erratically. Investors started searching for a more stable option. New technology was about to burst onto the scene and change the natural gas industry in Ohio. Traditional fracking techniques could only reach gas under a well. The new technology allowed companies to create multiple wells by making lateral, sideways moves from one place. That made the horizontal hydraulic fracturing more productive and more valuable.
And, Ohio has plenty of underground shale deposits to drill into the eastern part of the state.
The state’s priorities began to change, said Dave Anderson, policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute.
“The large amount of money that has come into developing the Marcellus Shale, and the massive amount of oil and natural gas and money that's being made off that has certainly provided a money incentive not to go as all in as clean energy as it once seemed like the state was going to do,” said Dave Anderson, the policy and communications manager for the Energy and Policy Institute.
The companies that profited from the increase in fracking were able to put that money into lobbyists that campaigned for more favorable policies. Some of those favorable policies also attacked renewable standards.
“You now had this competitive pressure in place,” said Kathiann Kowalski, a journalist who reports on energy in Ohio for Canary Media, “at the legislature, my suspicion is, that there was sufficient lobbying or enough lawmakers who came in and then started saying, ‘Okay, we don't want any subsidies now.’ They were treating the clean energy standards as if they were subsidies rather than incentives.”
Money from pro-fracking lobbyists predates Ohio’s shale boom. Strickland also received donations, dating back to his time as a representative in 2001.
“I'm not totally against fracking,” Strickland said. “It all depends on how it's done and where it's done. It's not the most desirable thing, but natural gas is better than coal.”
But a bill Kasich signed in 2014 seems to contradict his previous stance on renewables. It temporarily froze the renewable energy standards laid out in the 2008 Clean Energy Law that Strickland had rallied so much support for in 2008. The bill stopped the mandate that required Ohio utilities to purchase half of their renewable energy from Ohio.
Set back rule
But one of the largest blows to renewable energy’s future in Ohio came hidden within a budget bill in 2014.
“One of the provisions that was put into that bill, pretty much at the last minute, after all committee hearings had ended, was a section that tripled the property-line setbacks for wind energy,” Kowalski said.
Before the change, the law required a wind turbine to be placed a bit more than its height from a property boundary. The new law nearly tripled that.
Developers canceled projects that were no longer spatially or financially feasible.
The cancellation of projects cost the state, not only energy, but money as well.
“Somewhere between $5 and $7 billion of investment in building wind farms walked away when they did that, because it was no longer economically possible to build a wind farm in northwest or western Ohio,” Shanahan estimated.
Shanahan said most of that money would have gone to rural counties.
Jeff Bielicki, professor and head of the Energy Sustainability Research Laboratory at Ohio State, said the move harmed the industry in Ohio.
“You can see in the data, this sort of acceleration of wind turbine installations and electricity generated by wind, and then you see it flatten. It really inhibits the potential development of wind,” Bielicki said.
The setback rule Ohio has is one of the most restrictive in the country.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell which lawmaker added the setback amendment to the budget bill. In the legislative journal, the amendment is listed among nearly 100 others, which is attributed to several Ohio lawmakers.
There were some additional attempts to remove renewable energy incentives, but they either were voted down, or in one case, vetoed by Kasich.
House Bill 6
The next blow to renewable energy standards in Ohio has become infamous. The scandal exposed rampant corruption within Ohio’s energy sector among appointed officials, elected legislators, lobbyists and political party leaders.
House Bill 6, signed in 2019, was the result of utility company FirstEnergy bribing then-Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder to pass a bill that would bailout the company’s nuclear and coal plants, something that would cost taxpayers a total $1.5 billion. The racketeering scheme would land Householder in federal prison for a 20-year sentence. For further details on how the scheme unfolded, listen to WOSU’s podcast The Power Grab.
A lesser known effect of House Bill 6 is the change to the 2008 Clean Energy Law. The previous 25% renewable generation by 2025 was changed to only 8.5% renewable generation by 2026.
The targeting of renewable standards in the bill was not a coincidence. Energy generated by renewables was becoming cheaper, and companies that had the majority of their generation in fossil fuels started to panic.
“We're looking at the situation where they were having trouble not just competing against renewables whose price was coming down, but natural gas, which was also now getting onto the market in very large quantities,” Kowalski said. “The idea that one expert told me at one point was coal would have been able to compete against either natural gas or it might have competed against renewables, but the two of them together? And nuclear is even more expensive overall than coal because, while it's very cheap on a per unit basis marginal cost, the fixed costs for a plant are extremely high.”
Unfortunately for FirstEnergy, the majority of the utility’s generation was coal and nuclear. Previous lobbying efforts by the company have also been characterized as uniquely aggressive.
“I wasn't surprised with House Bill 6 because I knew how this company operated and how they would pressure people. I mean, as congressman and as governor, I felt that pressure. Thankfully, I was able to withstand it,” Strickland said about FirstEnergy. “Almost immediately, when John Kasich became governor, FirstEnergy reared their ugly head and started pressuring the legislature to turn back our mandates, our renewable energy mandates and efficiency mandates.”
Shanhan agreed, adding, “FirstEnergy has a long tradition of coming in and asking for the moon, and fighting for it, and then they walk away with three quarters of the moon.”
As part of its deferred prosecution, FirstEnergy has fired executives associated with the scandal and made other changes.
Why Target Renewables?
Fossil fuel companies first identified climate change as a man-made problem in the 1960s, and also identified that their products were among the largest contributors to that problem. Their response, which has been likened to tobacco companies, has been to sow doubt about the severity and even existence of climate change.
This effort has had extensive funding behind it, contributions from fossil fuel companies have funded several conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The shift away from renewables in Ohio has coincided with the state's shift towards conservatism. This has been expressed in rolling back renewable requirements, but doesn’t explain the restrictions that have also been placed on renewables.
“[Fossil fuel companies] really looked to make an example of Ohio that they could then try to duplicate in other states,” Dave Anderson of the Energy and Policy Institute, said. “Ohio is a place where they've been relatively successful.”
Anderson continued, “Ohio kind of stands out as a state that once had policies that were supportive of clean energy that have been rolled back.”
The degradation of Ohio’s renewable energy continued even after House Bill 6. In 2021, Senate Bill 52 took effect, which allowed individual Ohio counties and townships to ban solar projects. Almost half of Ohio’s 88 counties have at least one solar exclusion zone in the county, according to advocacy group Ohio Citizen Action.
Another odd addition was the reclassification of natural gas as a “green” energy in Ohio. House Bill 507 was a law signed in 2022 that mainly regarded regulations on poultry, bearing the name “Revise number of poultry chicks that may be sold in lots.”
The new classification of natural gas came as a last minute amendment.
Similarly, in 2025, a last minute amendment to House Bill 308 reclassified nuclear energy as a “green” energy. Both bills did exclude the newly reclassified energy sources from accessing tax subsidies associated with renewable energy.
