Recapping legal actions in the wake of Ohio’s biggest ever bribery and Racketeering case, generically known as the HB 6 Case, since it involved bribing legislators to help pass House Bill 6, a measure that forced Ohio ratepayers to subsidize failing nuclear and coal fired power plants.
Report includes very satisfying perp walk by Anti Clean energy (alleged) scammer Sam Randazzo.
Larry Householder
Unlikely to ever see the outside of a prison fence for the rest of his life, former Republican House Speaker Larry Householder had a tough year.
After his trial from January to March, Householder was found guilty of accepting a $61 million bribe in exchange for selling out the Statehouse to FirstEnergy and other utility companies. He used taxpayer money to create legislation called House Bill 6 that provided a more than a billion-dollar bailout for FE’s struggling nuclear power plants.
He used the bribe money to put himself and his allies into power, demolishing and threatening anyone in his path, as well as paying off credit card debt and renovations to his home in Florida.
He then fell into the FBI’s trap and, embarrassingly, lied on the stand. He seemed to not understand that the feds had recordings of him admitting to the crimes.
In June, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
“I’m not guilty,” Householder exclaimed following the verdict.
The jury, judge and FBI begged to differ.
Matt Borges
Former GOP leader Matt Borges got the short end of the racketeering stick, having his bribery scheme charges combined in the same trial as Householder.
He pocketed over $350,000 from the scandal, but his biggest faux pas was attempting to bribe an FBI informant with a $15,000 check.
He was also found guilty, which the foreman of the jury told News 5 was a much easier decision to make than Householder since it was so clear-cut.
“I did not believe that anything proved that I had engaged in a racketeering conspiracy, which is why I fought this from the beginning,” Borges said on the day the verdict was read.
Due to playing a significantly smaller role in the scandal and for seemingly taking responsibility for his actions in his sentencing request letter, he ended up with five years in prison.
Sam Randazzo
The dominos continue to fall in the H.B. 6 scheme. In early December, former chairman of the Public Utilities Commission Sam Randazzo pleaded not guilty after being charged with a dozen bribery crimes.
Unluckily for Randazzo, who didn’t also take a plea deal when Householder’s right-hand man, Jeff Longstreth, and FirstEnergy admitted to the scheme, he now has to deal with the ramifications of the information that is already public.
FirstEnergy has already admitted to bribing Randazzo with a $4.3 million payment so the former chairman could help the company behind the scenes — in one way — by pushing and helping to create H.B. 6.
Randazzo and his attorney have refused to address the scandal, but Case Western Reserve University law professor Michael Benza explained what fate likely awaits Randazzo.
“He will probably spend the rest of his life in prison,” the professor responded. “He would be looking at probably dying in prison.”
News 5 had a one-on-one interview with Gov. Mike DeWine, who said he regrets appointing Randazzo to the PUCO. DeWine and Lieutenant Gov. Jon Husted have both been subpoenaed in a civil case relating to this scandal and what they know about Randazzo.
Are we surprised to find out that, prior to his nomination, Randazzo had been deeply involve in opposition to clean energy?
Randazzo has also fought the development of wind power in Ohio as a lobbyist and attorney for Greenwich Neighbors United, an anti-wind group that refers to climate change as a “hoax” on its website. The cover letter and resume he submitted to the PUCO Nominating Council included no specific mention of Greenwich Neighbors United or wind power.
His job application also included no mention of the Sustainability Funding Alliance of Ohio, Inc., a shadowy for-profit corporation which Randazzo has listed among his sources of income and businesses in financial disclosure statements filed with the Ohio Ethic Commission. A company called the “Sustainability Funding Alliance” has popped up in filings in FirstEnergy Solutions’ bankruptcy case.
Clean energy advocates in Ohio question Randazzo’s ability to be impartial in cases involving renewable energy and energy efficiency. If approved to the commission, Randazzo may face calls to recuse himself from many cases involving his former clients and law firm.
In the introduction to a 2018 IEU-Ohio report, Randazzo attacked what he called “intermittent” renewable energy sources that “don’t show up to work” and celebrated what he viewed as “fierce local opposition” to wind and solar power projects.
Ohioans continue to foot the bill of not just former Speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder’s public corruption trial, but also the bill that landed him in federal court.
Every day, Ohioans fund two of Ohio Valley Electric Corporation’s (OVEC) coal plants. These subsidies are about $150 million per year, according to a study commissioned by the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association.
H.B. 6 was an energy bill that would provide a bailout to FirstEnergy and other failing or struggling utility companies. Householder is accused of accepting more than $60 million as a bribe in exchange for a $1.3 billion bailout for FirstEnergy.
Something is wrong with this. Let say I’m First Energy and I’m bribing government officials to get a $1.3 billion bailout. Cost to me is $60 million, so a good return on my investment. The public officials go to jail and I still get the bailout? What is to stop me from doing this again or other companies from doing this?
From https://www.utilitydive.com/news/firstenergy-ohio-organized-crime-commission-bribes-earnings/689798/
FirstEnergy has received a subpoena from the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission related to the company’s bribery scandal, Brian Tierney, the company’s new president and CEO said Wednesday during an earnings conference call.
The commission’s investigation appears to cover issues fleshed out in a deferred prosecution agreement, or DPA, entered into in July 2021 between FirstEnergy and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern district of Ohio, according to Tierney.
Under the agreement, FirstEnergy paid a $230 million penalty for bribing Ohio lawmakers to ensure the passage of a ratepayer-funded bailout for nuclear and coal-fired power plants.
Regarding the scandalous Ohio House Bill 6:
The nuclear bailout portion of that bill was repealed.
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ohiocitizenaction/pages/1626/attachments/original/1599756688/HB6_Impact.png
From https://www.utilitydive.com/news/firstenergy-ohio-organized-crime-commission-bribes-earnings/689798/
FirstEnergy has received a subpoena from the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission related to the company’s bribery scandal, Brian Tierney, the company’s new president and CEO said Wednesday during an earnings conference call.
The commission’s investigation appears to cover issues fleshed out in a deferred prosecution agreement, or DPA, entered into in July 2021 between FirstEnergy and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern district of Ohio, according to Tierney.
Under the agreement, FirstEnergy paid a $230 million penalty for bribing Ohio lawmakers to ensure the passage of a ratepayer-funded bailout for nuclear and coal-fired power plants.
The nuclear bailout portion of the scandalous Ohio House Bill 6 was repealed.
Thanks, I feel better now.
HB 6 started out as a help for efficiency & renewables, & was gradually corrupted to what it ended up as—nuke & coal money, nothing for efficiency or renewables. Great to see some of the people involved go to prison, but as far as I can tell, the bribery has still accomplished the main goal: delaying for years the replacement of fuels with efficiency & renewable energy.
Has an actual RE bill been proposed?
Yesterday on the PJM, Ohio’s area, nuclear made 8x as much power as wind and solar combined, twice as much as coal, and only about 20% less than gas. Not quite sure how much this ‘efficiency’ made, but some guy called Jevon has apparently been saying that the more of it you can get, the more you want, so I guess that’s good… The SunZia wind project, just financed, has been heralded as ‘ the biggest energy project since the Hoover Dam.’ Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia, almost complete, is at 2.2 GW nearly 10% percent bigger than the Hoover Dam, but if it reaches the US average of 92% capacity factor (versus 23% for that hydro plant, subject to drought not worsening), it will make over 4× as much power. Also like the Hoover, it should still be making power into the next century.
Hyenas test-chase animals in a herd, fixate on one they see as vulnerable, and run it down over as long a chase as it takes. The far right’s huge budget and wealth of astro-turf & lobbying firms gives them range & endurance to outrageously outspend progressive climate activists.
Sometimes they lock on to the animal’s testicles and hang on—like swift-boating only more painful.
Solar and wind aren’t the only renewable resources. When a pack of ignoble scavengers serially isolates and attacks each renewable source individually by pretending the others don’t exist and thus their complementary strengths are weaknesses, I think of it as the hyena fallacy, a form of cherry-picked strawperson. Like always cherry picking a time when their favorite source is producing a lot and others aren’t. In fact, renewables produce more energy than nukes in the US and the wold.
And in the US, efficiency has replaced more fossil fuel than any other source, so ridiculing it is kind of asinine.
“Disruptive energy futures”
Amory B. Lovins, 27 April 2017
The Rosenfeld Effect: electricity use per capita in California (CA) was almost flat from 1973 to 2006, while use in the United States rose 50%. The trend has continued since.
https://i2.wp.com/blogs.sussex.ac.uk/sussexenergygroup/files/2019/10/Amory-graph-1.png?w=1100
Jevons is crap, just another lie right wing ani-renewable fanatics use to slow its and renewables’ adoption. It holds true while energy use grows anyway, at or above a certain rate. Then it doesn’t. It can be changed. If energy were the only thing people invested their energy-related savings in, it would be self-perpetuating. But it’s not. It decreases exponentially.
“the more of it you can get, the more you want” is the definition of an addiction—a serious, sometimes fatal psychological problem.
“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.” W.H. Auden
And of course despite the fanatical attempts to endlessly delay them, renewables provide more energy than nukes in the US and the world, are most new energy built, and are growing exponentially while they continue to get cheaper incredibly fast. Solar alone was half of all added capacity in the 1st 3 quarters of 2023. (Yes, I know your answer to that.) But using the success of the utterly insane program to continue using fossil fuel, or try to replace a tiny part of it with far more expensive, water-intensive nukes, to commit to more of the same strategy, is even more insane—the projective blaming fallacy.
Is it a size contest?
“Ørsted Greenlights 2.9 GW Hornsea 3 Offshore Wind Farm”
Offshore Wind Biz, December 21, 2023
Ørsted is already operating the 1.2 GW Hornsea 1 and 1.3 GW Hornsea 2 offshore wind farms 160 kilometres off Yorkshire, expected to be completed 2027. Hornsea 4 project, which could have a capacity of up to 2.6 GW. Total may be 8GW at a capacity factor of 63% or better, not much lower than the rest of the world’s nukes’ (not counting the recent massive, years-long collapse of French nukes, of course, & the decades of cumulative delay in building Flamanville, Hinkey Point, Sizewell, Olkiluoto, Vogtle, etc.
Wind, solar & efficiency are still the cheapest energy of all, still take less land than fossil fuels, and less than nukes as the landscape gets filled with leaking abandoned uranium mines, reactors, and disaster sites.
“US Could Achieve 3X As Much CO2 Savings With Renewables Instead Of Nuclear For Less Money”
Cleantechnica, 2/20/2019
Nuke licenses may be extended for ever-longer times because the nuke industry is struggling just to keep capacity the same, and responds with self-serving, life-endangering bullshit rather than integrity, but no operating commercial nuke in the world is 60 years old. Many solar panels are. And those are the older, less well-built ones.
We need to eliminate emissions by 2030 or we face exponentially rising risk of effects that will prevent implementation of any solutions at all.
Existing reactors are mostly coming to the end of their operating time. (France’s enormous safety disaster was in mostly 40-year-old reactors.) New reactors are hella expensive, take an average of 15 years to plan, build, & test, then decades to pay back the carbon cost of their construction and are thus worse than useless for solving the climate crisis. Part of renewablizing is to electrify primary energy, reducing global energy use by half, so the 20% of electricity that current reactors supply, minus necessary closures coming up, is maybe 2-3% of our energy 2030-2050. The only way to increase it significantly this is to go on a staggeringly unprecedented reactor building spree that at current prices and construction times, is ludicrously impossible in addition to being horrifically unsafe, & in the end, unusable because its water requirements will be unmeetable. So curb your gloating. Nukes’ dependence on water is making them increasingly unreliable as water resources dwindle.
The only solutions to the energy side of the climate and larger ecological crisis are efficiency, wiser lives, and safe clean cheap fast reliable renewable energy.
French nuclear went from 340-390 TWh/year from 2017-2021, to 240 TWh in 2022. The stress cracks in safety system piping were found in newer reactors, not the older ones using the original Westinghouse pipe junction layout. Most are now back online, with output for 2023 liable to be around 320 TWh. Losses of production from rivers approaching discharge heating limits have never been more than a few percent, and can be fixed for rather less money than, say, building enough batteries to get France through one day of no sun, no wind, no fossils, and no nuclear.
If you tot up the power sources listed in Jacobson et al’s Solutions Project, they pay lip service to geothermal, tidal, new hydro (run of river only of course, no storage allowed), definitely no biomass, but 95% + of energy is projected to be from various forms of solar and wind.
I’m not saying efficiency is no use, it’s the reason California demand flatlined while population rose (that and high prices.) But though LEDs and heat pumps use a fraction of the power resistance lights and heaters used to, there was no commensurate fall in demand. Now sales of generators in California are booming. They’re far costlier and less efficient (and dirtier) than running your fridge and air con off the mains, but if people don’t trust the grid, they’ll do whatever it takes to keep things running.
Losses during the energy emergency were lower than they should have been because they allowed 5 reactors to continue destroying aquatic ecosystems. That’s getting worse, & will continue to.
I know how the ARFist, nook-boosting lunatic right wing loves to attack Jacobson & Germany, dismiss Iceland, and use only France as an example because it’s all they have…er, had. But there are other studies, & other countries, even other studies by Jacobson (2021, eg.) California prices are up because they’re trying to fix a state still suffering the ripples of the multi-billion dollar Enron disaster and multi-trillion dollar Prop 13 disaster, a grid stretched to breaking by climate-change-caused fires, heat waves, unprecedented storms, etc. and because conservatives have severely limited both collecting & selling solar electricity. If they ever get serious about efficiency, emissions, and removing the lunatics from power, they’ll ban gas in buildings, reinstitute a high FIT, drastically speed up offshore wind construction, build high speed rail from Mexico to Oregon, and lots more.
You absolutely did ridicule efficiency. You admit what it’s done then deny what it’s doing: keeping electricity use flat despite huge growth in population & economy. Transportation energy, emissions, & other pollution continue to be problems because the lunatics have continued to destroy the commons—grossly underfunding public transit & stopping high speed rail—and to endlessly delay renewables.