HANCOCK COUNTY, Ohio — Many across the state consider H.B. 6 signed by Gov. Mike DeWine a bailout for coal and nuclear energy, but a company whose is first of its kind in Findlay supports the bill.
Currently, any wind farm project in Ohio that exceeds five megawatts of production needs to go through the lengthy and expensive process of getting approved by the Ohio Power Siting Board.
One Energy, who builds wind turbines and sells the generated power directly to businesses and factories on site, purposefully never went above five megawatts in order to keep their projects economical and straight forward.
But the limit of power generation meant that some bigger potential clients wouldn't want to sign up.
"There are some big mega-users in this state who use an enormous amount of power. And if we'd approached them and say we could offset only five percent of what you're doing, they a lot of times say 'Don't even bother,'" said Katie Treadway, head of regulatory affairs at One Energy LLC.
A provision in the bill will expand the generation oversight limit up from five megawatts to 20, which means more customers could be willing to sign on to the direct on site turbine system from One Energy.
Additionally, the bill will keep these direct-to-customer turbine projects out of state oversight and the regulatory process will be handled at the local level.
"It's a win for us because we can do more of these projects and bigger projects. It's a win for our customers who can offset their usage, and then it's also a win for local communities who are able to use their local zoning process to have control over these projects and their size," Treadway said.
The provisions in the bill will go into effect in 90 days.