Editor's note: This is part three of the three-part "State of Energy" series from WOSU.
For the first time in more than 10 years, energy demands are increasing. There are varying causes, but the main culprit of the sudden increase in demand is the rapid expansion of data centers.
Ohio has emerged as a favorite place to develop new data centers due to the state’s access to cheap electricity and water for cooling. But not all are thrilled about the development, worrying about increased strain on the grid and higher electricity prices for consumers.
The State of Energy in Ohio
Ohio imports around 26% of the energy it uses.
“The chamber has always been for getting that number up into the nineties and trying to generate it from here for our economy and making sure we have a reliable inexpensive electricity market here in Ohio,” said Tony Long, director of energy and environmental policy at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.
Recent laws have also been attempting to reverse some of the damage done to the state’s renewable policies. Earlier this year, House Bill 15 created a new solar energy loan fund for public schools to be able to install solar panels.
The bipartisan bill also tracks electricity strain on the grid statewide, allowing developers to spread out energy intensive projects.
Some lawmakers are also starting to change the way they interact with utilities in the wake of the House Bill 6 scandal, which led to the imprisonment of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder.
“I think this new willingness to push back the utilities has gone way too far for way too long,” said Ohio House member Tristan Rader, who is a Democrat. “We need to make sure that we represent the people that live in our districts that deserve protection,” he said.
Rader is the ranking minority member of the Ohio House Energy Committee. He has a history of working with solar energy, previously serving as the Ohio Director for nonprofit Solar United Neighbors.
“If there's things that we can do to introduce maybe a little more competition, a little bit more consumer protection in order to make energy more affordable and clean, we're going to do it,” he said.
However, there is still lingering anxiety about the rapid increase of energy intensive data centers.
Related: Read part one WOSU's three-part "State of Energy" series: '25% generation by 2025': Where did Ohio’s Clean Energy Law go?
The rise of Data Centers
It’s no secret that construction of data centers has exploded in the past few years.
Ohio currently has 191 data centers, more than half of which are located in Columbus. The city now leads the nation with how quickly warehouses full of process servers are setting up shop. A report by real-estate firm JLL said that the amount of data centers increased in Columbus by 1,800% between 2020 and 2025.
“We do have a fair amount of undeveloped land, either in forests or agricultural land,” said Jeff Bielicki, associate professor and research lead at Ohio State University’s Sustainability Institute. “We also have our electricity prices below the national average. So we have cheap electricity in general compared to the rest of the nation. We have the resources, the land and other needs like for cooling and so on, and so it makes sense that Ohio would be attractive.”
State and local governments have also offered millions of dollars in tax breaks to data centers, angering many consumers who have seen their electric bills increase due to rising electrical demand.
The Ohio Chamber of Commerce released a study that found the state alone has invested $40 billion in data centers through 2030.
Lawmakers continue to court data centers as well. Ohio Representative Roy Klopfenstein (R-Haviland), reintroduced a bill to mandate that utility companies offer a program where the company can control a consumer’s thermostat. The idea, Klopfenstein said, was to allow utilities to raise or lower a thermostat a few degrees during the day to reduce energy usage. But freeing up that electricity would also benefit data centers.
“If we want to attract more business to Ohio, if we want to have the data centers here, if we don’t want rolling blackouts, we’re going to have to look at a number of creative things,” Klopfenstein told the Statehouse News Bureau.
Data center companies estimate large energy needs for centers, however the amount of energy they’re actually using remains mostly a mystery.
Reporting from Business Insider attempted to estimate the amount of power data centers actually use through requesting copies of permits centers filed for their backup generators. While mostly successful, they also came across several companies, like Google, that fully redacted their permits, citing trade secrets.
Of the 24 data centers the Business Insider investigated, centers owned by Amazon and Meta had the highest estimated electricity usage.
Data centers are not only for AI, as they house the entire internet. As seen by the effects of the recent widespread outage from Amazon Web Services, one of the largest data center operators in the world, data centers hold critical information that impacts everything from social media to hospital systems.
Experts have long warned against limiting data center development in Ohio, as the state is part of a 13-state grid, PJM Interconnection.
“I think the piece on the data centers, if they're somewhere in PJM, even if they don't come to Ohio, but if they are in one of those 13 states, that's our grid,” Long said. “Just because you forced them out of Ohio doesn't mean you still won't have constraints on the grid.”
Data centers' energy use has also drawn skepticism. Because companies haven’t made the actual amount of energy they use public, some wonder if data centers truly need the amount they claim they need.
One of those who encourages more transparency is Rader.
“I think some of it is an overreaction,” Rader said about the rush to increase energy supply. “Maybe there is a manufacturer crisis in there somewhere, but I think of it as an over reaction to the data center boom. Technology is changing so fast. We're seeing data centers using less energy than they had anticipated.”
Federal Effects
Federal policies also affect Ohio’s grid. The Trump administration has eliminated funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Biden-era policies helped to fund solar manufacturing in the U.S.
“We were very fortunate with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, that really incentivized a lot of solar manufacturing domestically,” said John McNamara, chief operations officer of Appalachian Renewable Power. “You saw a lot of factories get set up.”
One of those factories was Illuminate USA, located in Pataskala. The Inflation Reduction Act gave incentives to purchase domestically-produced solar panels, but without previous funding, McNamara is worried about the future of the industry.
Another concern for all energy generators are tariffs.
“Our lives today rely a lot on what are called rare earth elements and other critical minerals, and critical minerals are those types of materials, lithium, cobalt,” Bielicki said. “The United States does not have a lot of deposits of them. And so we rely heavily on imports.”
Bielicki said that critical minerals are called critical because of concerns with supplying them. Now, tariffs have made supplying critical minerals more difficult.
Related: Read part two WOSU's three-part "State of Energy" series: What did Ohio lose when it favored fossil fuels over renewable generation?
Ohio’s Energy Future
The increased strain on Ohio’s grid and shifting federal policy has state lawmakers looking for a change.
The Ohio House Energy Committee is currently discussing another bipartisan bill. This bill would allow something called a Community Energy Project.
“The idea is allowing local communities the opportunity to establish an electricity generating capability on their own as a group and then sell that energy to the grid” said Adam Holmes, chair of the Ohio House Energy Committee. “The payback would be reduced electrical bills for them, so self-generation.”
Holmes, a Republican, said he and the committee are focusing on an “all of the above” approach to energy. In a committee meeting, he described Ohio needing “every watt we can get.”
Data centers are also starting to face more regulation. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) has also applied new tariffs to data centers.
An energy tariff is the contracted pricing plan that outlines rates and rules for a consumer. The new ruling allows AEP to adopt separate rates for data centers, charging data centers for a percentage of electricity they estimate they’ll use, whether the energy is used or not.
The hope is that this will reduce overestimates of energy usage by data centers and ensure companies pay for transmission buildup caused by overestimates.
However, attorneys for companies including Google, Amazon Web Services and Meta have indicated they will appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court over the ruling.
It’s uncertain how the future of energy in Ohio will play out. Some lawmakers are anxious as they try to pass bills to improve Ohio’s energy infrastructure. But some, like Long, remain optimistic that Ohio is correcting course to avoid more intense problems like blackouts.
“I know that we're coming up on a timeline that can look scary, but I think we can find ways to continue to have the energy and electricity we need and meet the demands without turning the lights out,” Long said. “I'm going to stay optimistic, but we have to keep vigilant at it. We have to continue to talk about it.”
