An excerpt from the Meet The Bloggers transcript:
Bill Callahan: One of the things the governor does is elect the public utilities commission, or appoint the public utilities commission. Northern Ohio for as long as anybody can remember has had the highest total energy costs on both businesses and consumers outside of a couple of spots on the two coasts, and particularly electricity costs. We’ve gone through now over a decade of so-called deregulation and that has not changed. That’s obviously a competitive issue for businesses.What do you think, folks? Lower electric bills through new coal plants and fuel cells?
Eric Fingerhut: Absolutely.
Bill Callahan: What is your plan, if any, to deal with energy costs, particularly for this part of the state?
Eric Fingerhut: It’s a great question. It’s a classic and you focused properly on the PUCO as the location for creating positive change in this area. We need a new generation of electricity generating plants in Ohio for our competitiveness, for our environment, for our economy. It exists out there. The technology is being developed that would allow us to build much more efficient, clean, lower polluting, lower cost, energy generating plants.
So, the challenge for the next governor in working with his or her appointments to the PUCO, will be to work with – you’ve got to work with the incumbent utilities. I mean, they’re there. To work with them to develop a plan and an investment and a rate structure that says we are going to build these new plants. We’re going to build cutting edge, top of the line plants all over the state of Ohio. And what does it take for us to get there. By the way, there’s an irony in this which is if you actually were using the most modern technology, you could also burn Ohio coal. One of the things that’s happening is that these plants are all shipping coal in from the west and they’re not burning Ohio coal, and we’re getting the worst of both worlds. It’s still expensive and high polluting. But the technology exists to do it in the most modern and efficient plants.
The other thing that we’re going to do is we’re trying to build this fuel cell industry in Ohio. Obviously a lot of it’s based here in northeast Ohio. It’s another example of my argument about scale. We created the fuel cell institute at the Wright Center and all that. We put some money into it, but it’s a small amount ultimately. We’re going to have to significantly invest in that on an annual basis to get to the point where fuel cells could really be a source of energy. And Ohio can be the center of a new industry for it.
Bill Callahan: Quick follow-up question. The last time the state was told that we were going to lower electricity costs through a new generation of plant investment was in the 1970s. There were nuclear power plants and that’s the reason why we have the high rates we have today because northern Ohio is still paying for those investment costs. Could you speak to why what you just said is different and how it relates to the question of high electric rates now imposed on northern Ohio? I mean, do you think that you can lower electric rates by building new plants in the near term?
Eric Fingerhut: Yes, I do because it’s simply a fact that the new technologies that exist are lower cost because they’re more efficient. I mean, more efficient plants are lower cost. That’s one of the reasons why the cost of commodities comes down because the more you invest in the technology, the lower the price of producing each unit is. So, we need to move to the building of those. They tend to be smaller plants, but they’re more technologically advanced. Now, what we need to do to achieve that is to transfer the revenue stream that the PUCO has directed to those utilities to still pay off the old plants and transfer it into the investment in new plants. When you get those up and running – they don’t take decades to build, it’s a matter of a couple years — you can lower rates, absolutely. This isn’t going to happen overnight, but it can happen in the course of a gubernatorial term.