Ohio’s Energy Crossroads: Why “Best of the Above” Beats “All of the Above”

By Jon Paul Morrow, M.Econ., M.PoliSci.

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” – Margaret Thatcher

“The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” – Thomas J. Watson

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give it to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs

Ohio stands on the edge of an economic cliff, and it’s not because our people have lost their work ethic, or our businesses lack ingenuity. It’s because our energy strategy—if you can call it that—has been hijacked by a muddle of well-meaning but ultimately destructive “feel-good” policies and a regional transmission system run by unelected bureaucrats.

I’m talking about PJM Interconnection and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)—creatures of the big-government energy policy expansion that metastasized during the Obama years and never retreated.

For decades, Ohio built its economic power on cheap, reliable baseload energy—coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants that ran like clockwork, 24/7, 365 days a year. We had regulated markets overseen by elected legislators, flawed though they may have been. At least if they failed, we could throw them out at the ballot box.

Today, thanks to PJM’s “artificially contrived” markets, we have a deregulated façade where so-called “Competitive Retail Electric Service” (CRES) providers compete—not to lower your bill—but to see who can fleece Ohioans more creatively than the next guy.

Adam Smith once said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together… but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” That’s PJM’s markets in a nutshell.

Why “All of the Above” is Killing Us

Rod Adams of Atomic Insights put it best: Ohio doesn’t need an “All of the Above” energy policy. We need a “Best of the Above” policy. That means technologies that actually solve problems for Ohio’s grid and economy—not heavily subsidized, intermittent power sources like wind and solar that make our grid more fragile, more expensive, and more dependent on foreign supply chains (hello, China).

Wind and solar cannot replace baseload. They require massive overbuild, duplicative transmission, and fossil-fuel backup to keep the lights on when the wind dies or the sun sets. In other words, you pay for two grids—one intermittent, one reliable—and get none of the promised emissions reductions.

And yet, the current structure makes it look like wind and solar are the only path forward. That’s planned stupidity, dressed up in a green ribbon. Meanwhile, Beijing laughs all the way to the bank as we bankroll their rare-earth mining and solar panel production while they pour those profits into building coal plants and expanding their navy.

AI Is the New Steel Industry — And It’s About to Break the Grid

The AI revolution is not coming—it’s here. Data centers are sprouting across Ohio like mushrooms after a summer rain, pushed by companies with trillion-dollar market caps and lobbying budgets to match.

Each hyperscale AI data center can consume as much electricity as a large midwestern city. Multiply that by dozens of new facilities and you quickly see the problem: Demand is about to outstrip supply—dramatically.

The law of supply and demand is not optional. If Ohio doesn’t dramatically expand reliable baseload capacity in the next 3–5 years, electricity prices will double or triple. That’s not speculation—it’s baked into the math.

Jack Welch famously said, “Control your own destiny, or someone else will.” Right now, PJM and FERC control Ohio’s destiny, and they’re steering straight for a brick wall. And, as usual, they will point fingers elsewhere and never face any consequences for their incompetence.

The Mr. Magoo Grid

For the second summer in a row, Ohioans have been hammered with steep electricity price hikes. PJM’s bureaucrats have stumbled from near-miss to near-miss, dodging outages in true Mr. Magoo fashion, narrowly avoiding disaster while congratulating themselves for their “resilience.”

This avoidance of disaster is ending. Soon, not even the best grid engineers will be able to prevent cascading failures caused by overreliance on intermittent power, insufficient gas pipeline capacity, and the planned retirement of coal and nuclear plants.

Declare an Energy Emergency — and Mean It

To prevent catastrophe, Ohio’s legislature and Governor must:

1. Declare a state energy emergency.
   Halt all new grid-connected wind and solar projects until reliability margins are restored.

2. Accelerate combined-cycle natural gas buildout.
   Build plants and pipelines in parallel. Require wellhead freeze-off protection to keep gas flowing in extreme cold.

3. Leverage GE’s Ohio turbine facility.
   Work with GE in Cincinnati to expand production of large-scale combined-cycle turbines. Move Ohio utility orders to the front of the production queue.

4. Deploy molten salt heat batteries.
   Let baseload plants store heat for peaking use—solving ramping and peak demand problems without more gas.

5. Preserve and restart coal plants.
   Keep existing units online; bring recently shuttered units back as a stopgap until advanced nuclear is built.

6. Fast-track advanced nuclear.
   With Gen III+ and Gen IV reactors now backed by federal policy and funding, Ohio can lead instead of follow. We are in a moonshot race with China—either we build, or they own the future of nuclear.

From Fake Competition to Real Competition

Critics will say, “That’s not the free market!” I say, nonsense. We had more real competition when Ohio’s grid was regulated—competition between states, with natural monopolies managed and planned for reliability.

The new frontier of competition isn’t in selling kilowatt-hours on a fake PJM exchange—it’s in microgrids. These local grids can compete on price and reliability against the incumbent utilities, delivering real choice, which is precisely why PJM fears them.

Milton Friedman taught us: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” The results are in—PJM’s model has failed Ohio.

Final Word

Ohio’s energy policy can either continue down the “Mr. Magoo” path—dodging disasters until we finally hit the wall—or it can embrace a Best of the Above strategy: reliable baseload, advanced nuclear, gas turbines, and microgrids that compete in the real world, not on artificial markets.

The stakes are simple: control our own destiny, or watch someone else control it for us.