Inflated data center forecasts are raising Ohio bills

Your electric bill in Ohio might be going up because of a data center that doesn't exist yet. It might never exist at all. A Canary Media investigation this week looked at why. Ohio utilities base their spending, and what they charge customers, on data-center demand forecasts. Critics say those forecasts are wildly inflated. About 100 data centers are running in the state today, with nearly 150 more proposed.

Utilities predict how much electricity future customers, including planned data centers, will need. Regulators then let them charge everyone more today to build power plants and lines for that predicted demand tomorrow. The problem: a lot of proposed data centers never get built, or get built much smaller than announced. When that happens, ordinary households already paid for infrastructure sized for a data center boom that fizzled.

Keep reading — what to watch

Who should bear the risk when a demand forecast turns out to be wrong? Should it be the utility that made the bad guess, or the household that trusted it? Ohio hasn't answered that yet. Other states riding their own data-center booms are watching to see how it does.