Republican presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich speaks during a campaign stop, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, in New Boston, N.H. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) (Matt Rourke/AP)
CLEVELAND — “Gov. John Kasich warned Ohio GOP lawmakers during a presidential campaign stop this week in The Granite State that he will not stand for them to gut the state’s law’s requiring electric utilities to provide energy efficiency programs for customers and to sell more green power.
‘Some wanted to basically…stop the development of solar and wind and even efficiency standards,’ he said of Senate Bill 310 approved with heavy utility backing last spring freezing clean energy and efficiency standards while lawmakers “studied” the issue.
At Kasich’s insistence, the bill also contained a catch — that if lawmakers could not come up with a compromise after spending more time looking at the issues, the original, much tougher standards would automatically come back in January 2017.
The legislative study committee created by the bill convened to look further into the matter and came to the conclusion last fall that the freeze should remain indefinitely or at least until the fate of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan was determined.
‘That’s not acceptable,’ Kasich told the small New Hampshire crowd asking him questions at a town hall meeting. ‘We need to drive efficiency in this country. We should have been doing it … 40 years ago.'”
— John Funk, Cleveland Plain Dealer
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