Power & ratepayers
Whose grid this load lands on, and what it does to the households on the same wires.
Every megawatt figure about a data center sits over a denominator, and that denominator is somebody's grid. A real impact study names the grid and cites the source. It then states what the campus load does to the households on the same wires.
Whose grid this is
| Link | Identification | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Serving retail utility | AEP Ohio (Ohio Power Company) | [verified] |
| Holding company | American Electric Power (AEP) | [reference] |
| Balancing authority | PJM Interconnection | [reference] |
| Wholesale market (RTO/ISO) | PJM Interconnection (RTO/ISO) | [reference] |
| Retail rate regulator | Public Utilities Commission of Ohio (PUCO) | [reference] |
What those systems already carry
| System | Annual load | Campus share |
|---|---|---|
| AEP Ohio (Ohio Power Company) | 48,653 GWh/yr | 5.64% |
| PJM Interconnection | 815,056 GWh/yr | 0.34% |
| State retail sales | 161,934 GWh/yr | 1.69% |
The disclosed campus draws ~348 MW — at a 0.9 load factor, ~2,743 GWh/yr, the
numerator of every share above. The draw is itself an [inference].
The campus against consumer prices
Applying the stated short-run transmission coefficient ( 0.75 %price/%demand) to that share gives 0.85–1.69% on the 16.96¢/kWh residential price — deliberately stylized, an order of magnitude and never anyone's bill: the campus buys at wholesale, not the residential rate.
- The demand share and households-equivalent are the robust, EIA-cited headline; the price-pressure band is a STYLIZED screening sensitivity, not a forecast of retail bills.
- The campus buys at wholesale/industrial rates, not the residential price shown — residential price is the consumer-impact reference, not the campus bill.
- Facility draw is itself an assumption-laden estimate (air-permit IT load x PUE band, #87); the load factor and transmission coefficient are assumptions.
- Grid foundation layer (#94). The state, AEP Ohio (Ohio Power Company), and PJM denominators are now all connector-sourced — Ohio retail from EIA (shared with #91), per-utility retail from the EIA-861 file, and PJM annual demand from EIA-930. The campus is a single load equal to a material fraction of its serving utility's entire retail sales. Denominator vintages differ (utility EIA-861 2024 / BA EIA-930 2024 / state EIA 2025 (1-year spread)): the EIA state seriesid route publishes ahead of the EIA-861 bulk file and the EIA-930 annual sum, so the three shares are not struck against one common year.
The cited service chain with its full citations, the cohort-price qualification, and the load report's inference chain are in the grid annex.
AEP Ohio sells about 48,653 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity a year to 1,533,265 customers. The campus, run at the modeled draw, would consume about 2,743 GWh a year.
One campus would therefore take 5.64 % of everything the utility sells to a million and a half customers. Against Ohio’s whole retail load the share is 1.69 %. Against PJM, the regional grid operator that dispatches this part of the country, it is 0.34 %.
Those three denominators are the point of the chapter. The same campus is enormous, modest, or negligible depending only on which grid you divide it by. A claim that quotes one of them without saying which is not wrong so much as unreadable.
Read the caveats above as part of the finding
The demand share and the households-equivalent are the robust half of this chapter. Both rest on EIA seriesref that anyone can pull.
The price-pressure band is not the same kind of number. It is a stylized screening sensitivity, and it should never be quoted as a forecast of anyone’s bill.
Two more limits belong with any figure from this page. First, the campus buys at wholesale and industrial rates, not at the 16.96 cents per kilowatt-hour residential price shown here. That price is the consumer reference, and it is not the campus’s cost. Second, the campus draw is itself an inference, not a permitted quantity. It is built from a screened 275 MW computing load, multiplied by an assumed power-usage effectiveness of 1.265, and run at an assumed load factor of 0.9. No permit states the campus’s electrical demand.
What households already pay
The average Ohio household spends about $1,781 a year on electricity and $970 on natural gas, against a median household income of $62,001. Combined home energy takes 4.44 % of that income before this load arrives.
The grid connection itself is the missing record. AEP Ohio’s Lyka 345-kilovolt substation and line have no case before the Ohio Power Siting Board yet — the utility’s own project factsheetdoc is the whole of it. The transmission this campus needs is therefore documented nowhere the public can read it. That filing is tracked on the leads board, and it would let this chapter state costs rather than shares.
Learn to read the record behind this chapter → Project BOSC, Chapter 3: How big is it — and what won't they tell you?
The record behind this chapter
What this chapter stands on: the records it reads, the inputs its modeled figures rest
on, and the reference data behind its baselines — the same pages the record screens
serve, not a second copy. A figure the record does not support stays [open] and links nothing.
- Grid & consumer energy (US EIA)Reference dataset