DAYTON — The White House and a bipartisan group of governors, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, are talking about how much electricity data centers use.
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They say they want to make sure the electric grid operator in our part of the country does not pass the cost of that electric usage onto consumers on their utility bills.
The News Center 7 I-Team’s lead investigative reporter, John Bedell, has been covering data centers for months.
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On Monday, he talked to Ohio Governor Mike DeWine about his recent trip to Washington, D.C., and a plan to not pass on costs to you.
DeWine is one of 14 governors, including Democrats and Republicans, talking about, essentially, a supply and demand issue.
Data centers bring jobs and growth but also come with controversy – including the amounts of electricity and water the facilities use.
“Data centers, we believe, are important to our future,” Gov. Mike DeWine told the I-Team Monday. “We think they’re important to the economic development of the state of Ohio and job creation. But they need to pay their own way. And we joined with President Trump, the White House, and governors, Democrat and Republican governors. We came together this week and said, ‘we have to separate that out.’ So these companies are going to have to pay their own ways. And our PUCO is dedicated to make sure that that does, in fact, happen.”
As the number of data centers is increasing across the country so is energy demand. The White House Domestic Energy Council and that group of governors in our region have expressed concern about how PJM Interconnection prices electricity.
PJM operates the electric grid in the Midwest and covers the region that includes Ohio.
Here in the Miami Valley, Amazon is building a data center in Sidney and has a proposal in the works for another one in Wilmington.
“We actively work to keep energy costs stable for communities,” Amazon previously told the I-Team in a statement. “Rather than increasing costs for local communities, AWS (Amazon Web Services) actively works to keep energy rates stable and bring benefits to all energy users.”
“We are fully committed to paying our full cost of service, both for electricity and water,” Dan Diorio with Data Center Coalition previously told the I-Team. Data Center Coalition is the industry group that represents data centers.
While data center operators pledge costs will not be passed on to you, residents the I-Team has talked to across the country remain unconvinced that their electric and water bills won’t go up.
“There will come a reckoning, and we don’t want to see that happen,” Coweta County, Georgia, resident Rob Cole told the I-Team.
“It is going to put pressure on the county water supply,” Cole’s neighbor, Steve Swope, told the I-Team. “There’s no doubt about it.”
“I definitely believe that utility rates will go up in regards to data centers,” Alisha Lange of Piqua told the I-Team. “Just because statistically across the country where they’ve been popping up, they have increased utility rates.”
Gov. DeWine told the I-Team on Monday that the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) is dedicated to making sure any costs incurred by data centers are passed on to those data center operators and not other customers and consumers.
“That’s really what this discussion was about this week,” DeWine said. “Data centers, we think, are valuable. But we also know that people are very concerned, as they should be, that what’s happening with the data centers (is) they’re not paying their fair share. They end up driving up the price for people who live in their homes and who have nothing to do with the data center other than they happen to live in the same area.”
Earlier on Friday, before Gov. DeWine’s office sent a news release on the meeting in Washington just before 3:30 Friday afternoon, PJM put out the following statement regarding the event in D.C. and the statement of principles from the White House Domestic Energy Council and 14 governors, including Gov. DeWine.
“PJM is reviewing the principles set forth by the White House and governors.” The statement said. “The PJM Board’s decision, resulting from a multi-month stakeholder process on integrating large load additions, will be released later today. The Board has been deliberating on this issue since the end of that stakeholder process. We will work with our stakeholders to assess how the White House directive aligns with the Board’s decision.”
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