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 | Indiana Michigan Power Co | [reference] |
| Holding company | American Electric Power (AEP) | [reference] |
| Balancing authority | PJM Interconnection | [reference] |
| Wholesale market (RTO/ISO) | PJM Interconnection (RTO/ISO) | [reference] |
| Retail rate regulator | Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) | [reference] |
What those systems already carry
| System | Annual load | Campus share |
|---|---|---|
| Indiana Michigan Power Co | 14,998 GWh/yr | 6.15% |
| PJM Interconnection | 815,056 GWh/yr | 0.11% |
| State retail sales | 103,488 GWh/yr | 0.89% |
The disclosed campus draws ~117 MW — at a 0.9 load factor, ~922 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 0.45–0.89% on the 16.23¢/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, Indiana Michigan Power Co, and PJM denominators are now all connector-sourced — Indiana 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.
A hyperscale data center is, in physical terms, an electrical load with a roof. So the obvious question — how many megawatts? — is also the hardest, because nobody is required to say.
What the air permit discloses, and where it stops
Google’s campus holds an IDEM Title V air
permitrec , Indiana’s major-source operating permit. A data center is an air source for one
reason: its diesel emergency generators. The permit discloses that fleet — 34 diesel emergency
generators, 26.4 MMBTU/hr each. [verified]
The genset count is a floor signal, not a load. Hyperscale campuses back up their IT load N+1 or
2N, roughly a genset per data hall, and 34 units is the scale of a multi-building campus,
consistent with the seven buildings the site plan shows. What the permit does not state is the
campus’s IT-load MW — the number the whole subsidy question turns on. [open]
That silence is structural, not accidental: an air permit must list what emits, and it need not list what draws. This is the disclosure boundary, and reading it correctly is the difference between “undisclosed” and “hidden.”
The substitute the record does offer
The demand is genuinely undisclosed. In its place the public record offers a behaviour: Google and
Indiana Michigan Power won IURC approval for a demand-response program — an agreement to
curtail machine-learning workloads in certain hours to ease grid strain. [verified] A
demand-response deal is a tell that the load is large enough to need managing. It is not a capacity
figure, and this study does not convert it into one: the platform’s SiteFacility power basis
stays None rather than fabricate what the permit withholds.
For system scale only, and tagged as such: I&M projects its peak demand roughly doubling, ~4,000 MW
to ~8,000 MW by 2030, explicitly driven by hyperscaler data centers, of which this is one.
[reference]
Hold the pieces together: $2 billion in capital, roughly 200 permanent jobs, and a 10-year 50% property-tax abatement worth ≈ $55.5 million — against an information-sector location quotient of 0.44, a sector under-represented locally. The recurring shape of this network: an electricity and water load, not an employment base.
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