Ohio has made $100 million available for new energy projects in the state, but critics are pushing back on the decision to bar renewable energy projects from accessing the funds — and on the lack of transparency around the process.
The JobsOhio Energy Opportunity Initiative was announced by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine last October. It is administered by the state economic development entity JobsOhio, a private organization that is exempt from Ohio’s public records law, even though it performs functions that were previously done by the state’s Department of Development and is funded by money that the state used to collect as taxes on the sales of alcoholic beverages. (Now JobsOhio gets that money instead.)
The Energy Opportunity Initiative, whose funding will come from a chunk of those liquor sales payments, offers grants and loans to companies to boost the state’s energy supply and access to it. But the initiative limits applications to projects for natural gas infrastructure and small modular nuclear reactors, even though solar and wind are the fastest and cheapest forms of energy to deploy — an example of how Ohio gives preferential treatment to fossil fuels and nuclear energy and snubs renewables.
