Jon Husted

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for that electric bill to drop back to something resembling normal, you can exhale — because according to energy experts, it’s not happening anytime soon.

In fact, Ohioans could be stuck with elevated electricity rates through the end of the decade. And the reason why should make every ratepayer in the state furious.

On Friday’s episode of Today in Ohio, host Leila Atassi and cleveland.com editor Courtney Astolfi broke down a damning new analysis from consumer advocacy groups that pulls back the curtain on what’s really driving your monthly bill — and the answer has two words: data centers.

Here’s what the numbers look like. According to consumer advocates, wholesale generation and transmission costs made up roughly 68% of the average Ohio electric bill last year. Those costs have surged because PJM — the regional grid that serves Ohio and neighboring states — is scrambling to build enough new power plants to keep pace with the explosive demand coming from data centers.

Clara Summers, who leads a consumer advocacy campaign tracking these costs, made it plain: “Our bills would be nowhere near as high were it not for data centers and PJM’s independent market monitor.”

PJM’s own monitoring arm estimated that data center demand has added nearly $30 billion to wholesale electricity costs just since 2024. That’s almost half of all capacity costs charged during that period.

So how did Ohio end up here? That’s where the conversation on Today in Ohio got pointed.

“This is really the fault of Governor Mike DeWine and his former lieutenant governor, who’s now the Sen. Jon Husted, who invited these colossal data centers to our state to provide our communities no direct benefits and to just guzzle the energy from the grid and spike our energy bills for years to come,” she said.

The criticism cuts to the heart of a policy debate Ohio has been slow to have: who pays when Big Tech shows up and plugs in? Right now, the answer is ordinary ratepayers. Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, but the infrastructure costs needed to serve that demand are spread across everyone’s bills — yours, your neighbor’s, the small business down the street’s.

The proposed fix that Atassi and Astolfi discussed isn’t particularly complicated. It’s the same principle that governs most things: if you create the demand, you pay for the infrastructure. A recent editorial from the cleveland.com and Plain Dealer community of readers — later echoed by mayoral candidate Amy Acton — argued exactly that. Data centers should bear those costs directly, not everyday Ohioans.

PJM appears to be waking up to the problem. The grid operator is exploring emergency rule changes that would require large electricity users like data centers to make their own deals with power plant developers rather than letting those costs bleed into everyone’s bills. There’s also talk of a one-time auction this fall to attract new power plant developers, with contracts lasting up to 15 years. Federal regulators may force additional changes by the end of the month.

But as Astolfi cautioned, even dramatic policy shifts now won’t quickly unwind what’s already been set in motion. “This is set a long-term, a longer-term kind of trend in motion. I don’t know how you unpeel it quickly,” she said.

Listen to the full discussion here.

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