Tag Archives: Energy Policy

Commentary

Ohio governor John Kasich’s energy policy: sustainability and job creation

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All of the above makes a lot of sense in Ohio, as John Kasich explains in the Columbus Dispatch.

Excerpt:

Ohio’s agriculture and manufacturing sectors are highly productive and among our state’s largest employers. They’re also big energy users and part of the reason why Ohio ranks seventh nationally in energy generation.

With energy being so important to major Ohio job creators, it’s critical that we do everything possible to make it inexpensive, plentiful and reliable.

Unfortunately, Ohio faces major headwinds on energy from Washington. The U.S. lacks the kind of comprehensive energy policy it takes to achieve energy independence and help job creators secure low prices and reliable supplies. Furthermore, coal — which supplies 86 percent of our electricity — irritates the current president, and his administration’s EPA repeatedly threatens more red tape on Ohio’s growing shale-oil-and-gas industry.

This uncertainty from Washington isn’t sustainable for Ohio. If we want to see more Ohioans working again, we need to foster low costs and greater certainty in energy, and if we can’t get it with help from Washington, then Ohio must seek it ourselves.

That’s his thesis – now let’s see some of the details:

[M]y administration worked with Ohio State University and Battelle to convene the Governor’s 21st Century Energy & Economic Summit. Over two days, the summit brought together 50 panelists from business, government, academia and environmental groups and more than 1,000 attendees to discuss the latest, brightest thinking on energy. These conversations were the first step in helping Ohio’s policymakers develop a comprehensive energy policy to support job creation. That work continued over the winter and produced a comprehensive plan covering the full range of Ohio energy issues. I’m proud to say I’m signing that plan into law on Monday.

A major focus of Ohio’s new energy policy is oil-and-gas production in our state’s Utica shale formations. With new technologies making it possible to tap oil, natural gas and natural-gas liquids in shale rock deep beneath the surface, the potential exists to permanently lift the economy of eastern Ohio and turn Ohio into a major oil-and-gas producer. It’s only smart to make sure that as this new industry comes on the scene, strong policies are in place that can help ensure its safety and success. Ohio’s energy policy does that by modernizing our regulatory structure to protect the public, the environment and the industry’s workers and to facilitate the industry’s growth.

Ohio’s new energy policy also promotes clean-energy generation. While Ohio’s manufacturers are certainly big energy users, they’re also potential sources of clean energy. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that as much as 2,000 megawatts of energy could be generated by capturing and reusing the waste heat in Ohio factories. That’s enough to power more than 1.4 million Ohio homes. To help encourage this, Ohio’s new energy policy adds waste heat to the list of clean-energy sources, along with solar and wind, that can earn special “renewable energy credits,” credits that manufacturers can then sell for extra income.

Other highlights of Ohio’s new energy policy include efforts to encourage the use of cars that run on natural gas, to improve state buildings’ energy efficiency, to get electricity to the places where it’s most needed to create jobs, to create programs that link Ohioans who need jobs with training for the new jobs in the oil-and-gas industry, and to make valuable investments in clean-coal research   and technology.

If I had to pick the 3 best governors in the USA, I would pick Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana. These guys punch way above their weight, and all 3 states are swing states. You have to have better ideas to win those states. You have to win on the merits.

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Green firm that got $1.46 billion in bailouts announces 2000 layoffs

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Doug Ross linked to this Washington Examiner article about First Solar.

Excerpt:

First Solar, a solar energy company that received a $1.46 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy, announced today that it will layoff 2,000 workers in the United States and world-wide.

The company will  “indefinitely idle” four production lines in Malaysia and shutter a plant in Germany. “These actions, combined with other personnel reductions in Europe and the U.S., will reduce First Solar’s global workforce by approximately 2,000 positions, about 30 percent of the total,” First Solar announced today.

“After a thorough analysis, it is clear the European market has deteriorated to the extent that our operations there are no longer economically sustainable, and maintaining those operations is not in the best long-term interest of our stakeholders,” said Mike Ahearn, Chairman and Interim CEO of First Solar, in a statement.

In December, First Solar laid off 100 employees at a Santa Clara , Calif., plant. The DOE has committed $1.46 billion to a project in Riverside County, California expected to create 15 permanent jobs and 550 construction jobs.

The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney reported last month that the Export-Import Bank also subsidizes First Solar, helping the company “to sell solar panels to itself” by having a Canadian solar company “wholly owned” by First Solar by its parent company’s products.

Selling solar panels to a wholly-owned Canadian subsidiary??? YES.

Excerpt:

A heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself.

[…]First Solar is an Arizona-based manufacturer of solar panels. In 2010, the Obama administration awarded the company $16.3 million to expand its factory in Ohio — a subsidy Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland touted in his failed re-election bid that year.

Five weeks before the 2010 election, Strickland announced more than a million dollars in job training grants to First Solar. The Ohio Department of Development also lent First Solar $5 million, and the state’s Air Quality Development Authority gave the company an additional $10 million loan.

After First Solar pocketed this $17.3 million in government grants and $15 million in government loans, Ex-Im entered the scene.

In September 2011, Ex-Im approved $455.7 million in loan guarantees to subsidize the sale of solar panels to two wind farms in Canada. That means if the wind farm ever defaults, the taxpayers pick up the tab, ensuring First Solar gets paid.

But the buyer, in this case, was First Solar.

A small corporation called St. Clair Solar owned the wind farm and was the Canadian company buying First Solar’s panels. But St. Clair Solar was a wholly owned subsidiary of First Solar. So, basically, First Solar was shipping its own solar panels from Ohio to a solar farm it owned in Canada, and the U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing this “export.”

How did this company get such a huge taxpayer-funded bailout from the Obama administration?

Because, like Solyndra and SolarReserve, etc., First Solar is linked to Democrats.

Excerpt:

First Solar founder and Chairman Michael Ahearn, whom Reuters reported cashed in $68.9 million of his company’s stock last month, has donated $123,650, along with his wife, to the Democratic Party and Democratic candidates during the three most recent cycles, mostly in Arizona.

The solar energy giant, the nation’s biggest, also spent more than $1.5 million lobbying Congress and the Obama administration since 2009 on the stimulus and subsequent green-jobs plans. This included approximately $400,000 paid to the Washington Tax Group, which also represented Solyndra.

If you click through on that article, you can read about how SolarReserve is linked to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s brother-in-law, Ronald Pelosi and to Tony Podesta,  the brother of John Podesta — who ran Barack Obama’s presidential transition team. This is the energy policy of the Obama administration: stop drilling, stop coal, stop nuclear, stop pipelines, and give taxpayer money to people who can get you elected. All the Democrats do is provide bailouts for Democrat-connected businesses and subsidize exploding Chevy Volts built by overpaid unionized auto workers. That’s it. That’s their plan.

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The ten worst energy policies of the Obama administration

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Heritage Foundation put this list together.

Here are a few examples:

5) The EPA’s Regulatory Train Wreck: The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ream of new regulations will adversely affect existing power plants, requiring them to be retrofitted or in many cases shut down because it will be too costly to install emission-reduction controls The most recent announcement of the President’s ongoing campaign against carbon-based fuel, the EPA released a new rule to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants, which would effectively ban new coal power plants, as its emissions standards are too low to be met by conventional coal-fired facilities. That will result in higher energy costs, fewer jobs, a less prosperous economy and no discernible difference in global temperatures.

6) Cap-and-Trade and the Clean Energy Standard: When he came into office, President Obama latched on to the notion of cap-and-trade — a system of energy taxes and credits designed to reduce carbon emissions. The end result would have been disastrous for American businesses and the economy. When that legislation failed, the President proposed a Clean Energy Standard mandating that the power industry  meet government-determined goals with respect to renewable energy production. The effect, though, is the same.  Both serve as a draconian energy tax that burdens businesses and consumers – with no environmental benefits.

8) Terminating the Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.  The Obama Administration   says it wants to pursue nuclear power, but its rhetoric does not match its nuclear policy.  Its decision to abandon the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project without any technical or scientific data is a case in point.  With nearly $15 billion spent on the project, the data indicates that Yucca would be a safe place to store America’s used nuclear fuel.  Yet purely for political reasons the Obama administration decided to terminate the program without having anything to replace it. Absent any nuclear waste disposal options, the United States simply will not significantly expand nuclear energy.

9) Green Jobs Stimulus: With the U.S. economy struggling to recover from a recession, President Obama turned to a trillion dollars in stimulus spending in an attempt to spend America out of the economic doldrums. A significant part of that stimulus was directed toward a new “green” economy with taxpayer dollars directed toward creating alternative energy jobs. Obama promised to create five million green jobs over 10 years. The trouble is that his plan didn’t work, and the jobs didn’t materialize. As The New York Times reported, it was nothing more than “a pipe dream.” Further, these are taxpayer-funded jobs that destroy jobs elsewhere in the economy. When the government gives money to build a windmill, for example, those resources cannot simultaneously be used to build other products. The net effect is job and income losses.

10) Job-Killing CAFE Standards: Obama’s EPA has imposed a corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard requiring auto makers to hit an average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025—a 40 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared to today. The Center for Automotive Research warned that overly stringent standards could add $10,000 to the cost of a new car, decreasing sales and thereby reducing production, destroying as many as 220,000 jobs, according to a report by the Defour Group. And a 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concludes that CAFE’s downsizing effect makes cars less safe and contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year.

Do you wonder why the unemployment rate is more than double what it was in during the Bush administration? Or why we are running deficits four times higher than what we had in the Bush administration? Or why gas prices have tripled compared to what they were under the Bush administration? Well, when you look at a list like this, you will realize that it is all the deliberate result of incompetence in policy making by the Obama administration. They did everything wrong, and now we are paying the price for it.