Across California, the companies that are trying to build charging stations for electric trucks are being told that it will take years — or even up to a decade — for them to get the electricity they need. That’s because utilities are failing to build out the grid fast enough to meet that demand.

This poses a major problem for a state that’s aiming to clean up its trucking industry. California has the most aggressive set of truck electrification goals in the country, and compliance deadlines are coming up fast.

State legislators did pass two laws last year — SB 410 and AB 50 — ordering regulators to find ways to speed up the process of getting utility customers the grid power they need, and last week the California Public Utilities Commission issued a decision meant to set timeframes for this work.

But charging companies, electric truck manufacturers, and environmental advocates are not happy with the result. They say the decision does next to nothing to get utilities to move faster or work harder to serve the massive charging hubs being planned across the state.

“It’s shocking how little the commission did here. They basically adopted status quo timelines across the board,” said Sky Stanfield, an attorney working with the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a nonprofit clean energy advocacy group.

California’s struggle to deal with this issue is raising doubts about not only whether the state can meet its own climate goals but also whether truck electrification targets are achievable at all. States in the U.S. Northeast and Pacific Northwest with transportation-electrification targets will also need to build megawatt-scale charging along highways. Those projects will likewise require grid capacity upgrades that take a much longer time to plan and build than charging sites for passenger vehicles.

Stanfield and IREC believe that the CPUC’s decision both is inadequate and runs counter to clear instruction from California law. SB 410 orders the CPUC to craft regulations that ​“improve the speed at which energization and service upgrades are performed” and push the state’s big utilities to upgrade their grids ​“in time to achieve the state’s decarbonization goals.”

But the state’s electric truck targets simply won’t be met if charging stations aren’t built more rapidly, Stanfield said. ​“No one’s going to buy a fancy EV truck that costs well over $100,000 if they can’t charge it.”

IREC isn’t alone in this perspective. Powering America’s Commercial Transportation, a consortium of major EV charging and manufacturing companies, wrote in its comments to the CPUC that the decision ​“does not comply with either the requirements or legislative intent” of the law.

PACT asked the CPUC to set a two-year maximum timeline for utilities to build new substations and complete the more complex grid upgrades required by large EV charging depots.

But instead, the CPUC simply had Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison , and San Diego Gas & Electric report how long these major ​“upstream capacity” grid projects are taking today and then used the lower average of that historical data to set maximum timelines that utilities should meet in the future.

Those timelines are much, much too long, electric truck manufacturers, charging-project developers, and clean transportation advocates say. They stretch from nearly two years for upgrading distribution circuits and nearly three years for upgrading substations to nearly nine years for building the new substations that utilities say they’ll need to power truck-charging depots currently being built. 

“We’ve put in millions of dollars in the facilities we’ve already upgraded, and more that are in motion,” said Paul Rosa, a PACT board member.

As senior vice president of procurement and fleet planning at truck leasing company Penske, he is responsible for the company’s transport projects, including truck-charging projects in Southern and Central California.

But those projects represent just a fraction of the 114,500 chargers required to support the 157,000 medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that the California Energy Commission forecasts the state will need by 2030. 

“If we can’t get the power, this all comes to a screeching halt,” Rosa said.

The big problem with the grid and trucks

The slow and burdensome process of getting new customers connected to the grid — ​“energization” in CPUC parlance — isn’t a problem for just EV trucks.

PG&E has been under fire for years for failing to deliver timely grid hookups to everyday commercial and residential projects — a result, critics say, of poor planning and resource management.

The CPUC’s new decision does set a 125-business-day maximum timeline for these less complicated energizations. If those targets are met by utilities, ​“maximum timelines for grid connections could be reduced up to 49 percent compared to current operations,” the CPUC noted in a fact sheet accompanying the decision.

“I think the commission got it right” on these less complicated energization targets, said Tom Ashley, vice president of government and utility relations at Voltera, a company building EV charging projects across the state.

But how the commission handled the larger-scale grid upgrades — the kind needed to get EV truck-charging stations up and running — is a different story, he said. ​“That is where the industry is really frustrated that we didn’t get the help, and the utilities didn’t get the direction.”

The state’s Advanced Clean Trucks rule requires truck manufacturers to hit minimum targets for zero-emissions trucks as a percentage of total sales over the coming years, ratcheting from 30% of all medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2028 to 50% by 2030.

And California’s Advanced Clean Fleets rule requires the state’s biggest trucking and freight companies to convert hundreds of thousands of diesel trucks to zero-emissions models over the next 12 years, with earlier targets for certain classes of vehicles, including the heavy trucks carrying cargo containers from California’s busy and polluted ports.

Right now, many of the plans to build charging hubs for those trucks are stuck in grid-upgrade limbo — and the CPUC decision offers little indication it will get them unstuck.

“We’ve submitted for well over 50 projects in the past two years, looking for the right property to acquire,” said Jason Berry, director of energy and utilities at Terawatt Infrastructure. The startup has more than $1 billion in equity and project finance lined up to build large-scale charging hubs, including a network that will stretch from California to Texas along the I-10 highway, a major trucking corridor.

But of the sites Terawatt has scouted in California, ​“about 95% of those do not have the power we’re trying to request,” Berry said. To serve proposed charging hubs in California’s Inland Empire, utility SCE has said that it will need to expand existing substations, which takes four to five years, or build a new substation, which takes at least eight years, Terawatt said in May comments to the CPUC.

Terawatt is far from the only company facing delays. In testimony to the CPUC, Berry pointed out that Tesla has told the agency that 12 Supercharger sites with 522 charging stalls are facing delays because of capacity issues in SCE territory. A state-funded electric truck-charging project in the Inland Empire is also held up due to similar constraints.

The main problem is that large-scale charging sites can be built much faster than utilities are used to moving, Berry said. ​“We’re building projects, maybe ideally starting at 10 megawatts and then going to 20 megawatts,” Berry said. That’s about the same load on the grid as would be caused by an entirely new residential neighborhood or big commercial or industrial site.

But while those sites typically take years to plan and build, a new truck-charging site can go from planning to completion in less than a year.

“They have to have a mechanism to start on those things, or every single project is going to be four to five years out — which is what we’re being told on so many of these today,” he said.

The same point was made by Diego Quevedo, utilities lead and senior charging-infrastructure engineer at Daimler Truck North America, which joined fellow electric truck manufacturers Volvo Group North America and Navistar to weigh in on the CPUC proceeding.

“Trucks can be manufactured by OEMs and delivered approximately six months after receiving an order,” Quevedo said in testimony before the CPUC. But fleets won’t order trucks if they lack the confidence the utility grid infrastructure will be built and energized when the trucks are delivered.”

Utilities’ grid-capacity additions are taking from seven to 10 years to ​“plan, design, budget, construct, and energize,” he said. Unless those capacity expansions can be sped up significantly, ​“electric trucks become expensive stranded assets that are unable to charge,” he said.

Why it’s so hard to speed up expensive grid upgrades 

California’s major utilities have a different perspective. They’ve argued in comments to the CPUC that it may be difficult or impossible to move more quickly on such complicated work.

First, as utilities have pointed out, many of the things that can slow down major grid projects are beyond their control. In a filing with the CPUC, PG&E noted that ​“one capacity upgrade project may face an extended timeline due to lengthy environmental assessments and permitting processes, and another may encounter challenges in acquiring materials in a timely manner due to manufacturer issues.”

IREC’s Stanfield conceded that equipment backlogs and environmental and permitting reviews are barriers to moving more quickly. ​“But we have to make it go faster if we want to hit our climate goals, if we want manufacturers to build clean trucks.”

And there’s an even bigger challenge to making major changes to the grid in anticipation of booming demand from EV charging: the cost involved. 

“Lack of funding is the big block to meet the anticipated load growth,” Terawatt’s Berry said.

California’s utilities are already spending more than they ever have on their power grids, for myriad reasons. They are passing the costs of grid-hardening investments and integrating new clean energy into the power system on to customers in the form of electricity rates that are now the highest in the continental U.S.

Electricity rate increases are an economic and political crisis in California. Keeping them from rising any further has become the chief focus of lawmakers and regulators in the past several years. Any proposals that could raise customer bills even more face a tough battle — including plans to build grid infrastructure for electric truck-charging hubs.

SB 410 does give the CPUC permission to allow utilities to increase their spending in order to meet tighter EV-charger energization timelines. But the bill also calls on regulators to subject these requests to​“extremely strict accounting.”

PG&E was the first utility to submit a ratemaking mechanism under SB 410 earlier this year. The Utility Reform Network, a ratepayer advocacy group, quickly filed comments protesting the utility’s plan to create a ​“balancing account” that would enable it to recover as much as $4 billion in additional energization-related spending from customers — a structure that falls outside the standard three-year ​“rate case” process for California utilities.

“PG&E’s electric rates and bills are now so high that they threaten both access to the essential energy services that PG&E provides and the achievement of the state’s decarbonization goals, which rely in part on customers choosing to electrify buildings and vehicles,” TURN wrote in its comments.

TURN wants the CPUC to limit the scope of SB 410’s extra cost-recovery provisions to ​“specific work needed to complete an individual customer connection request,” rather than the kind of proactive upstream grid investments that truck-charging advocates are calling for. TURN would prefer that those projects remain part of general rate cases, the sprawling proceedings that determine how much utilities spend on their grids.

But those general rate cases can take up to five years to move from identifying the broader, systemwide analyses of how much electricity demand is set to rise to winning regulatory approval in order to build the expensive grid infrastructure needed to actually meet those growing needs. That’s too long to wait to fix the problem, charging advocates say.

At the same time, ratepayer advocates are challenging utility efforts to expand the scope of their larger-scale plans to meet looming EV charging needs. In SCE’s current general rate case, TURN and the CPUC’s Public Advocates Office, which is tasked with protecting consumers, are protesting that the utility is overestimating how much money it needs to spend to prepare its grid from growing EV-charging needs.

Terawatt and other charging developers and electric truck manufacturers argue just the opposite — that the utility isn’t planning to spend enough over the next three years. In his testimony in the rate case, Terawatt’s Berry complained that TURN and PAO are challenging utility and state forecasts of future charging needs based on outdated data, and that failing to approve the utility’s funding request will ​“ensure that California fails to achieve its zero-emission vehicle goals.”

Charging advocates have also asked the CPUC to create a separate regulatory process to consider the grid buildout needs spurred by large-scale charging projects. But the CPUC rejected that concept in its decision last week, stating that ​“preferential treatment based on project type is prohibited by California law.”

Finding a way to plan the grid ahead of big charging needs

All these conflicting imperatives leave the CPUC with tough choices to resolve the gap between charging needs and grid buildout plans, said Cole Jermyn, an attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund.

The CPUC ​“can and should do more here. I don’t think the timelines they set here are as strong as they could have been,” Jermyn said. 

At the same time, ​“the commission had an incredibly difficult job here. The targets are not easy to set, and they had a very short timeline to do it.” 

That’s why multiple groups have asked the CPUC to focus its next phase of work on implementing SB 410 and AB 50 on a key issue: aligning grid planning and EV charging needs.

“Part of the work here is figuring out what that proactive planning looks like,” Jermyn said. ​“The utility cannot wait around for customers to come to them and say, ​‘We need 5 megawatts of capacity.’ They need to be looking out into the future to start proactively preparing their distribution grids for all this electrification.”

At the same time, ​“how do you balance that need for proactive planning and investment with ratepayer investments along the way to make sure this isn’t building assets that won’t be used and end up on someone’s bills?” Jermyn asked. That will be complicated, but, he added, ​“I think it’s doable — especially for a state that has such clear goals.”

SB 410 also specifically called on the CPUC to take California’s decarbonization goals into account in tackling energization delays — but last week’s decision ​“was relatively silent on that issue,” Jermyn said.

“This is something we think is incredibly important to be in the next phase of this proceeding, because it wasn’t in this one,” he said. ​“We don’t know if the timelines they set are meeting that goal or not. We should figure out if they are.”

EDF has advocated for years for utilities and regulators to approve grid spending in advance of EV charging needs, noting that such spending will end up reducing costs for utility customers in the long run.

That’s because California’s utilities don’t earn profits directly through electricity sales. Instead, their rates are structured to repay their costs of doing business. More customers buying more electricity can spread out the costs of collecting the money that utilities need to operate and invest in infrastructure, which can reduce the rates per kilowatt-hour that utilities must collect in future years.

This isn’t just a California issue. Nearly a dozen states — including Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington — have adopted advanced clean truck rules. They’re not as aggressive as California’s rules, but meeting them will still require grappling with the same challenges around proactive grid planning.

Voltera’s Ashley worried that the CPUC’s decision may set a bad precedent for other state regulators on this front. ​“The commission has a really hard job. They’re tasked with a lot of complicated policy and execution,” he said. ​“And at the end of the day, they have some overarching mandates, including affordability for ratepayers,” that complicate the task.

But California also has ​“the most aggressive targets, goals, and statutory requirements around not just electrification of transportation but electrification of other segments” of the economy, he said. ​“If California doesn’t get this right, who will?”

California’s backlogged grid is holding up its electric truck dreams is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

ALSO:

• Advocates criticize the federal Bureau of Land Management for reaffirming contested Trump-era oil and gas and helium leases in a protected area in Utah. (Salt Lake Tribune)
• Two firms agree to pay $50 million to settle litigation over alleged conspiracy to manipulate southern California gasoline spot prices in 2015. (San Diego Union-Tribune)

UTILITIES: Oregon’s largest natural gas utility misses its goals for blending renewable fuels into its pipelines to offset carbon emissions for a second consecutive year. (OPB)

GRID: Northwest energy officials predict rising power demand from data centers could push the grid to its limit within five years. (Seattle Times)

WIND: 

• California’s energy commission approves an offshore wind strategic plan aimed at developing 25,000 MW of capacity by 2045. (CalMatters)
• Wyoming regulators greenlight a planned 504 MW wind power facility delayed by legal complications after the developer changed ownership. (Cowboy State Daily)

SOLAR: 

• A western Colorado solar education and training center opens its courses to high school students to prime them for clean energy careers. (Sopris Sun)
• A southwestern Idaho county’s residents push back against a proposed utility-scale solar project on private land, saying it will convert farmland into a “glass desert.” (KTVB)
• A developer proposes a utility-scale solar installation on 1,300 acres of private land in northern Utah. (Utah Public Radio)

TRANSPORTATION: The Biden administration awards a northern California transit agency $15 million to acquire hydrogen fuel cell buses and train workers on zero-emissions technologies. (East Bay Times)

CLIMATE: Observers say Montana’s Supreme Court appears divided over an appeal seeking to overturn a ruling in a youth climate case the judges considered this week. (E&E News, subscription)

NUCLEAR: A Wyoming oil and gas and coal mining equipment manufacturing firm pivots to cater to the state’s nascent advanced nuclear reactor industry. (WyoFile)

TRANSMISSION: 

• A southern Colorado county approves a proposed transmission project but rejects a solar installation that would have tied into the line, citing environmental concerns. (Alamosa Citizen)
• California lawmakers advance stripped down legislation aimed at streamlining transmission project permitting on state lands. (RTO Insider, subscription)

OVERSIGHT: California legal experts predict the state’s strong environmental regulations will mute the effects of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings aimed at dismantling the administrative state. (CalMatters)

POLLUTION: Monitors show Colorado’s Front Range has violated U.S. EPA ozone pollution standards multiple times this summer, potentially sparking a crackdown from federal regulators. (Colorado Sun)

More from the Energy News Network: Midwest | Southeast | Northeast | West

Wyoming blocks conservationists from bidding on oil and gas leases is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A California nonprofit launches a campaign to build an electric vehicle charging network in the Imperial Valley, known as the state’s harshest “charging desert.” (CalMatters)

ELECTRIFICATION: California researchers find pollution emitted from natural gas-fueled cooking stoves may contribute to tens of thousands of premature deaths and childhood asthma. (Los Angeles Times)

SOLAR:

• Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signs a bill aimed at reducing utility-scale solar siting conflicts by creating model land-use ordinances for local governments. (Solar Power World)
• California lawmakers advance legislation that would restore the ability of schools, farms and multifamily buildings to offset utility bills with rooftop solar. (Canary Media)
• A Washington city launches an automated residential solar permitting pilot project aimed at expediting the process. (news release)
• A 150 MW solar-plus-storage project in southern California comes online to power an Amazon data center. (Solar Power World)
• The federal Bureau of Land Management seeks public input via a virtual meeting on three proposed solar projects in western Arizona. (news release)

CLEAN ENERGY: Oregon advocates urge Portland’s city council to reserve a multimillion-dollar clean energy fund for climate action projects and resist proposals to spend it on unrelated budget items. (Utility Dive)

BATTERIES: Firefighters continued to contend with a battery fire for a sixth day at an energy storage facility in southern California. (San Diego Union-Tribune)

MINING: The Biden administration awards a firm $20 million to expedite development of a proposed battery-grade manganese mine in southern Arizona amid advocates’ opposition to the project. (Arizona Republic)

OIL & GAS: 

• Washington and Oregon officials seek the source of an oil spill that has coated and injured birds along the Northwest coast. (Jefferson Public Radio)
• Wyoming’s oil and gas industry claims the federal Bureau of Land Management’s new rules raising reclamation bonds will disproportionately harm small producers. (County 17)

HYDROPOWER: 

• A Washington state electric cooperative launches a feasibility study of incorporating tidal power into its San Juan Islands grid. (Salish Current)
• Oregon lawmakers, advocates, tribal nations and public utilities call on Congress to decommission eight hydropower dams on the Willamette River to aid in salmon recovery. (Bloomberg Law, subscription)

CARBON CAPTURE: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signs legislation establishing a regulatory framework for geologic carbon storage. (Fox 21)

TRANSMISSION: A utility and developer are selected to build a high-voltage transmission line designed to carry renewable energy across southern California. (Power Technology)

COMMENTARY: A California editorial board urges state lawmakers to pass legislation that would require fossil fuel companies to pay into a climate change mitigation fund. (Los Angeles Times) 

More from the Energy News Network: Midwest | Southeast | Northeast | West

New Mexico hydrogen projects advance amid advocates’ opposition is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

A group of New England utilities plans to seek federal funding for a regional energy data platform that would make it easier for consumers and contractors to estimate potential savings from efficiency upgrades or new electric technologies. 

Clean energy advocates see this kind of service as key to supporting the rollout of Inflation Reduction Act rebates and, more broadly, to controlling costs and demand on a lower-carbon power grid. 

Energy providers Unitil, Eversource and Liberty Utilities are working with several subsidiaries and state groups and agencies to propose the new data platform to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) grant program, created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. 

Their $29 million data hub concept, with half the funding requested from the Department of Energy, builds off a similar state-level platform that’s been in the works in New Hampshire since 2019. Proponents say federal funding is needed in part to encourage that state’s regulators to give final approval for the project. 

Launched over the next four years, the regional data hub would provide standardized access to “very minute usage information” for millions of gas and electric customers and third-party service providers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, according to Unitil. 

“With this data more readily available, customers could better understand their energy consumption, which would help them make decisions about energy conservation steps they may want to take at home or in the workplace,” Unitil said in a statement. “For instance, the information could be used to obtain a price quote from a rooftop solar provider, a competitive supplier to receive a price estimate, or a storage provider to determine the appropriate size of behind-the-meter battery storage.”

‘An incredibly silly manual process’

Multi-utility data platforms currently exist in Texas and New York, both states with unified electric grids, proponents said — but in New England and many other places, customers’ data access is inconsistent. 

In a concept paper on their data hub proposal filed with the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission earlier this year, the Northeast utilities say costs for efficiency projects and clean energy upgrades, known as distributed energy resources or DERs, can be inflated by the “idiosyncratic processes” and “bespoke electronic interfaces” needed to work with each customer’s data. 

“Today, DER providers pay as much as $300,000 annually for screen-scraping programs to extract customer electric data from bill PDFs, while others install monitoring packages with their solar and storage applications that are functionally duplicative of the utility’s advanced meters, driving up costs by $15,000 or more per installation,” the proposal says. 

To estimate cost savings in a quote for rooftop solar, for example, a homeowner may have to provide a year’s worth of paper or electronic bills for their prospective installer to compile and analyze by hand — an “incredibly silly manual process,” said Sam Evans-Brown, the executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire, a nonprofit that’s participating in the regional data hub proposal. 

“And that’s just the single homeowner level — think about a multi-family housing project, where you have forty, fifty, a hundred units, each with their own electric bill,” he said. “It’s just a total nightmare.” 

An automated system would access customers’ data on demand in a standardized format and could spit out expected project savings at essentially the push of a button, he said. Contractors he’s spoken with, he said, call this approach “transformational for the way that we interact with customers.” 

The data hub could also support energy dashboards, especially for environmental justice areas, to help visualize progress toward climate targets with a goal of “reducing the energy burden for historically disadvantaged communities,” said Eversource spokesperson Sarah Paduano in a statement. 

“By breaking down the walls of historically utility-housed and owned data, Unitil believes this would remove a significant barrier for a variety of stakeholders that would be able to leverage the data in a meaningful way and towards advancing an equitable clean energy transition,” Unitil’s statement said.

Data for a more responsive grid

Estimated savings from individual energy projects aren’t just nice to have, said Michael Murray, president of Mission Data Coalition, another nonprofit working on the hub project — they are often required. Certain Inflation Reduction Act rebates are only offered to projects that can prove at least a 20% energy savings. 

“The legislation was really intended to be the first sort of fusion between making an efficiency project a smart grid asset,” Murray said. “It’s no longer just, ‘efficiency is in its own silo and all you care about is annual energy savings.’ The question is, how does it become interactive and part of a ‘virtual power plant’ kind of concept?”

Better data on individual projects could help customers access savings from new rate designs that incentivize less usage at times of peak demand, the proposal says, improving resilience and lowering costs on a more variable, renewables-powered grid. 

“Energy data is increasingly going to become the currency of a modern grid,” said Evans-Brown. “It’s really difficult to manage our peaks if you have no idea where they’re coming from, like what’s causing them all the way down to the consumer level.” 

Without standardized, streamlined access to energy data, Murray said, contractors trying to work with IRA rebates in states that choose to offer them will face a costly and time-consuming burden of iterating individualized manual processes thousands of times. 

“(The IRA) is going to touch millions of American homes. Each one of these is multiple data requests and processing. And so we need to figure out a way to do it in a streamlined way,” he said. Otherwise, “all that federal money gets drained into stupid overhead as opposed to actually delivering value for people.” 

Not every New England state or utility is participating in the grant proposal. Connecticut-based Avangrid, with subsidiaries like Central Maine Power or CMP, is one that declined to join. 

CMP received a $30 million GRIP grant in the program’s first round last year for technology to reduce the frequency and impact of power outages, and plans to seek additional GRIP funding on its own this year. 

“Our decision for round two was to focus on reliability and load capacity grid improvement projects in Maine, particularly those that impact disadvantaged communities,” said spokesperson Jon Breed in a statement. “We are aware of the concept of the Regional Joint Utility Energy Data Hub and will be monitoring the performance of the program if it receives funding.”

For Murray, the long-term goal is a data platform that covers the entire territory of ISO-New England, the six states’ regional grid manager. He said utilities — and their customers — that don’t get on board, if the project moves forward, could risk becoming siloed and left behind in older systems.

“The whole industry is moving towards an automated system, which New Hampshire is building,” he said. “That’s where we ultimately need to go.”

New England utilities plan ‘transformational’ data platform to make it easier to calculate energy savings is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s claim to not know about the millions an Akron utility spent supporting his 2018 campaign for governor simply isn’t credible, an Ohio political scientist said in a recent interview. A spokesperson for DeWine pushed back.

FirstEnergy provided that support, then spent more than $60 million to pass and protect a $1.3 billion ratepayer-financed bailout that mostly benefited the utility. In 2019, DeWine signed the law within hours of its passage. 

But now that two GOP officials are in federal prison as part of the scandal and two others involved in the scheme have died by suicide, DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted are downplaying what they knew about FirstEnergy’s support for their campaigns. They’re also downplaying connections between their administration and the utility.

They say they supported the unpopular bailout because they thought it was good public policy to protect nuclear generation in Ohio.

However, a batch of records turned over in response to a records request by a group of news organizations — including Floodlight, the Energy News Network, the USA Today Network and the Capital Journal — are showing that the support they’ve gotten from FirstEnergy is greater than previously known.

Big, dark money

The company made donations totaling $1 million to 501(c)(4) dark money groups supporting Husted in 2018 before he dropped his gubernatorial bid and joined the DeWine ticket. The records also reveal that the company gave as much as $2.5 million to dark money groups supporting DeWine the same year.

Husted’s office wouldn’t say whether the lieutenant governor knew about the contributions at the time they were made. DeWine Press Secretary Dan Tierney last week denied that DeWine knew about the trove of newly revealed FirstEnergy contributions. 

University of Cincinnati political scientist David Niven said there’s a “zero-percent chance” that DeWine’s claim is true. He explained that in 2018, there was a nationwide backlash against the presidency of Donald Trump and support for Democrats was surging. That meant a “razor-wire thin” election for DeWine, a Republican running in a state Trump carried by eight points two years earlier, Niven said.

DeWine “was running in an election cycle when the tide was going against his party,” Niven said. “The notion that he was just this fumbling, naive grandpa who has no idea about seven-figure flows (supporting) his campaign is perhaps the single most far-fetched thing he’s ever said.”

There’s also the fact that it’s questionable for a company to make such a huge expenditure and not make sure the public official benefiting from it knew about it That seems especially true of FirstEnergy, which later admitted to paying an outright bribe of $4.3 million to Sam Randazzo just before DeWine nominated him to regulate the company and other Ohio utilities.

A state indictment of Randazzo and two former FirstEnergy executives says that on Dec. 18, 2018, the executives had dinner with Gov.-elect DeWine and Lt. Gov.-elect Husted and went from there to Randazzo’s condo to arrange the bribe. Randazzo, who was accused of helping to draft and lobby for the corrupt bailout, died by suicide earlier this month.

Return on investment

Tierney, DeWine’s press secretary, was asked last week why FirstEnergy would spend millions supporting his boss and not make sure DeWine knew about it. Tierney cited rules prohibiting dark-money groups from coordinating their activities with campaigns. 

“Regarding your question regarding why donors to independent expenditures might not engage candidates directly on the independent expenditures, my guess is that this goes back to the fact that it is illegal for candidates to coordinate with 501 (c)(4) independent expenditure groups,” Tierney said in an email. “I would guess that entities that frequently make such donations are aware of those legal restrictions. I don’t believe you were trying to accuse the Governor of illegal conduct, as he follows the law, but I would vociferously push back on any such innuendo as there is no basis for it.”

However, merely informing a candidate of a contribution to an independent group doesn’t seem sufficient to meet the state’s definition of “coordination.” That applies to communications “made pursuant to any arrangement, coordination, or direction by the candidate, the candidate’s campaign committee, or the candidate’s agent… ” the Ohio Revised Code says.

Some special interests have made pious claims that they spend millions supporting candidates not to buy influence, but because they wish to support good governance. Niven, the political scientist, said such a claim would be laughable in the context of FirstEnergy and Ohio’s 2018 gubernatorial election.

“This is all about return on investment,” said. “This isn’t even primarily about affecting the outcome of the election, it’s about affecting the behavior of the elected.”

And, Niven said, given that FirstEnergy’s expenditures in 2018 and 2019 won it a billion-dollar bailout, “The return on investment on this thing is spectacular.”

Who benefits?

In an email, Tierney questioned press coverage implying that groups supporting DeWine received all of the $2.5 million in dark money FirstEnergy put up in 2018. The donations were made to a dark money group affiliated with the Republican Governors Association, but only $500,000 was specifically labeled “DeWine.”

“… I am sure Ohio political reporters are laser-focused on Ohio matters, I would point out that FirstEnergy operates in seven states,” Tierney said. “Some of those states have Republican governors, others have had recent Republican governors, and even more have had competitive gubernatorial elections recently as well.”

However, of those states, only four — Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland — had gubernatorial elections in 2018. And of those, Ohio’s was by far the closest and thus the most likely to be affected by big expenditures. It’s also the the state that had two nuclear plants that FirstEnergy was desperate to bail out.

DeWine beat Democrat Richard Corday by 3.7 percentage points. The next-closest race was in Maryland, where Republican Larry Hogan beat Democrat Ben Jealous by 12 points — or more than triple the margin in the Ohio race.

In addition, among the documents obtained by the news organizations are messages that demonstrate FirstEnergy’s interest in plowing dark money into Ohio’s 2018 gubernatorial election. One, from FirstEnergy Vice President Michael Dowling, attempted to ease worries over the company’s massive expenditures through the Republican Governors Association to help DeWine and Husted.

“Theoretically, DeWine/Husted could have a balance of $10M in their campaign account and the RGA could spend $40M in support of DeWine in Ohio,” Dowling said in an email first reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer. “My point is that comparing the size of a contribution to the RGA to what the DeWine campaign has raised or what the DeWine Campaign’s current balance is can be done, but I’m not sure is logical.”

Other claims

In addition to pleading ignorance of FirstEnergy’s dark money, the governor and his staff haven’t explained what senior members of his administration who had close connections to the company knew about about a vital part of the scandal — the relationship between FirstEnergy and the man DeWine picked to regulate it.

The governor and his staff have claimed that connections between Randazzo and FirstEnergy were common knowledge when DeWine took office in 2019. However, there’s little evidence to support the claim. 

Meanwhile, Randazzo’s state indictment says Randazzo and FirstEnergy had a long, secret partnership that paid Randazzo millions even before his $4.3 million payoff in 2019. It also lays out evidence that both parties were anxious to keep it hidden. 

Throughout the scandal, DeWine and his staff have staunchly maintained that the governor supported the FirstEnergy bailout not out of any ulterior motive, but because he thought it was good public policy. To support that, Tierney last week pointed to the fact that Cordray, DeWine’s Democratic challenger, also supported keeping FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants open.

But there’s some important context. FirstEnergy gave dark money to support DeWine and oppose Cordray. In addition, DeWine’s chief of staff, legislative-affairs director and his choice to regulate the industry all had lucrative financial connections to the company either contemporaneously or in the recent past.

“It’s just laughable,” Niven said. “They find themselves in the literal center of the biggest corporate-political swindle in the state’s history and their answer is, ‘Well anybody would have done this.’”

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said he didn’t know of millions in FirstEnergy support. Is it plausible? is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.