$445,000 a Day: The Coal Subsidy That Outlived the Scandal

In 2021, Ohio repealed House Bill 6. That is the sentence most people remember, and it is doing a lot of quiet work. The legislature repealed the part of HB 6 everyone was angry about, the nuclear subsidy at the center of the bribery case. It left the other part alone.

The other part was a subsidy for two aging coal plants. It kept charging Ohio ratepayers roughly $445,000 a day. It did that in 2021, after the scandal broke. It did it in 2022, and 2023, and 2024. The law that a bribe had bought was national news, its authors were on their way to prison, and the meter kept running.

The repeal that repealed half a law

Here is the thing about the 2021 "repeal." It made a real headline and a partial fix. Under public pressure after the FirstEnergy scheme became a federal case, lawmakers pulled the nuclear subsidy that HB 6 had handed the company, worth an estimated $150 million a year. That was the loud number. Killing it let everyone say the scandal law was gone.

The coal subsidy was the quiet number, and it survived. It funneled money to two plants run through a consortium of utilities, propping up generation that a competitive market had already priced out. One of the two plants isn't even in Ohio. Ohioans paid for it anyway, a little every month, whether or not they ever heard the letters "HB 6."

Why the quiet charge is the honest measure

A scandal gets judged by its worst headline. The bribe, the Speaker, the 20-year sentence: those are the parts that make the news, and they are real. But the test of whether a corrupt law actually got cleaned up is duller than any of that. It is the line item that stayed on the bill after the cameras left.

By that test, the cleanup ran four years behind the outrage. The nuclear subsidy died in 2021 because it was the thing people could name. The coal subsidy lived because it was the thing they couldn't. Same law, same origin, two very different lifespans, decided by how much attention each piece attracted rather than how much it cost.

That gap is where accountability usually goes to hide. Fixing the embarrassing part buys the appearance of a solution. The expensive part keeps flowing underneath it, in a form too technical to chant about outside the Statehouse.

The charge finally comes off

Only in May 2025 did House Bill 15 repeal the remaining coal subsidies. Six years after HB 6 passed, four years after the "repeal," the $445,000 a day finally stopped.

HB 15 did more than close that one wound. It eliminated the "Electric Security Plan" riders, the mechanism utilities had used to tack extra charges onto bills without a full accounting. It required utilities to justify their rates in a complete case every three years instead of coasting on old approvals. For once, a law written for the people paying the bill rather than the company sending it.

The timing tells you how these fights actually work. The dramatic reckoning, the convictions and the prison sentence, arrived years before the boring one, the removal of a charge from a monthly statement. Punishing the people who wrote a corrupt law and undoing what the law did to your budget are two separate jobs, and the second one moves slower.

What this means heading into 2026

The coal subsidy is off the bill now. The question it raises is not. The legislature that took four years to finish repealing HB 6 is the same body Ohio voters staff every cycle, and its seats decide whether the next round of consumer protections goes further or stalls where HB 15 left off.

There is already a next round waiting. Data centers are pouring into Ohio and someone has to pay to build the grid for them. The same choice HB 6 got wrong, whether the cost lands on a company or on your kitchen table, is live again in front of the same regulators, watched by the same legislature.

So when the next energy law arrives wearing the language of reform, the useful question is the one the 2021 repeal should have taught everyone to ask. Not whether lawmakers fixed the part that made headlines, but whether they left a quieter, more expensive part running on your bill, betting you would never learn its name.