Ohio's data center boom: Power costs

Ohio has become a major hub for data centers, the large buildings full of servers that help power everything from cloud storage to AI. But, as the industry quickly grows, major questions are emerging, like who should pay for them and how they impact the communities that surround them. State leaders, regulators, utilities and residents are now all part of the debate. According to the Data Center Map, there are more than 200 data centers in Ohio. These range from smaller facilities to larger "hyperscale" campuses. The Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel said the fast growth of data centers could lead to higher electric bills for everyday Ohioans if costs are not properly assigned. “Ohio families shouldn't be forced to subsidize billion-dollar tech companies' electric needs. If the data centers are driving the cost, they should pay for the cost,” said Maureen Willis of the OCC. "Essentially, cost-causers should pay for the costs they create." Willis said multiple components of consumers' bills could eventually be impacted. "When you increase demand and supply stays static, the prices are going to go up. So we've seen that on the capacity side, and now, we're anticipating that we'll start seeing it on another piece of the consumers' bill, which is the transmission piece of their bill, and that's for transporting the power from the power plant to the local electric utility," said Willis. "There is some distribution costs. We've seen interconnection costs of data centers, but primarily what we've seen is that capacity cost, but we anticipate seeing much, much more costs on the transmission side." Willis said the OCC aims to protect consumers by advocating for them before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, in addition to involvement with work being done at the Ohio General Assembly. 3News reached out to electric company FirstEnergy about consumer concerns related to rising costs possibly tied to data centers, but they did not provide a representative for comment before this story aired. The focus of much of the data center debate is big tech companies, which have been behind some of the larger data centers built across the country. Google has three data centers in Ohio in New Albany, Lancaster and Columbus and two more under development. Google Data Centers Area Operations Manager for Ohio, Timothy Chadwick, said locations are carefully evaluated. Watch our full three-part series: https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/ohio-data-centers-debate-google-new-albany-columbus-fairlawn-gig/95-f8c26d25-caf8-48ac-92d0-7750ce73a0bd