CINCINNATI — President Donald Trump caught Ohio’s attention Tuesday night when he started talking about data centers.
Even a Cleveland-area Democrat liked his idea.
“I disagreed with the vast majority of what Trump said,” said Rep. Tristan Rader, who represents West Cleveland and Lakewood in Ohio House District 13. “However, there’s one area where President Trump and I have at least a tiny bit of alignment, and that’s around holding data centers accountable.”
Here’s what Trump said in his State of the Union Address:
“Americans are also concerned that energy demand from AI data centers could unfairly drive up their electric utility bills. Tonight, I'm pleased to announce that I have negotiated the new ratepayer protection pledge, you know what that is. We're telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs. They can build their own power plants as part of their factory so that no one's prices will go up, and in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community and very substantially down.”
Watch: Should data centers 'bring their own energy' to Ohio?
Some critics have questioned whether the proposal will lead to lower utility rates because it’s getting more expensive to build power plants and generating electricity isn’t the only thing that makes data centers expensive.
But Rader applauds the “ratepayer protection pledges” as a good first step.
“First thing we want them to do is to bring their own energy,” Rader said. “Of course, I would love them to bring solar or wind … but even if they could bring any type of energy, it’s going to help reduce rates because the loads they’re requiring for these data centers are absolutely enormous.”
Rader cites a recent report by Monitoring Analytics Inc., which tracks energy trends for PJM Interconnect, a power grid manager for a 13-state region that includes Ohio and parts of Kentucky and Indiana.
“They were looking at these capacity market charges and in 2025 and 2026, and the capacity charges that were charged to consumers were $16 billion,” Rader said. “So, data centers are essentially causing a massive wealth transfer. That’s what they call it, a massive wealth transfer from us ratepayers to these mega data center sites.”
Ohio already has five natural gas-fired power plants in the works for data centers. The plants, in Licking and Wood counties, have a combined capacity of 1,000 megawatts, according to Matt Schilling, spokesman for the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio.
The PUCO took steps to rein in data center costs last July, when it required “electric service agreements” to require financial commitments from developers and discourage speculative projects.
But the new policy impacts only data centers within the service territory of AEP Ohio, which covers all or part of 61 counties.
In a Feb. 12 report to PUCO, the utility said the new initiative reduced a statewide list of projects seeking 30,000 megawatts of new service to a more manageable data load of 5,642 megawatts.
“It is clear that AEP Ohio’s infrastructure has been timely deployed to serve the historic level of data center load demand — while protecting all non-data center customers by avoiding any overbuild or excess transmission capacity,” said the AEP report.
Encouraged by those results, Rader co-sponsored House Bill 706, which extends AEP’s approach to the rest of the state.
“They’re wreaking havoc on our grid, and we need something,” Rader said. “We need to do something to make sure that these data centers are paying full freight when they show up.”
Not everyone is convinced that Ohio or Trump have everything under control.
“Do I think that they are going to make their own power to generate? Absolutely. Do I think it’ll come over into our part of the grid? No, not a bit,” said Jessica Baker, a Mt. Orab realtor who has joined with dozens of her neighbors to push back against data center expansion into Adams, Brown and Clinton counties. “We might be able to level out our bills but our trade for that is small nuclear reactors in the middle of nowhere in southern Ohio.”
Baker is worried that data centers, and the new power plants that feed them, might create a new generation of environmental problems. That leads her to question whether so many computer farms are necessary.
Don’t make her choose between “country living” and her phone, she adds. “I know what I’m choosing, and it’s not my phone.”
