By:Nick Evans-May 29, 2026
Ohio lawmakers kicked off hearings for a new data center committee Wednesday. Stakeholders from the industry, utility regulation, and state agencies shared their views on data centers’ impact on the cost of power, the environment, and the economy.
Taken together, the speakers sought to downplay and displace concerns about the expansion of data centers around Ohio.
Ohio is now home to more than 200 data centers, with another 77 planned by the year 2030.
“We are all driving data center demand,” Dan Diorio from the Data Center Coalition told lawmakers.
Sure, artificial intelligence is a significant and growing driver, he said, but basic cloud computing infrastructure makes up the biggest share of data center computation. The number of people who are online now has almost doubled since 2018.
“The average household has 21 connected devices,” he said, between phones, laptops, watches, TVs, and thermostats. “My oven is connected to Wi-Fi. I can preheat it from here.”
And anyway, Diorio added, data centers are good for local economies, creating jobs in construction and upkeep, while placing limited demands on local services like schools.
Polling from Gallup shows 7 in 10 Americans oppose data center construction in their neighborhood.
Lawmakers expressed more concern with how to move forward than how to divvy up blame.
“What I also heard him say,” Ohio state Sen. Brian Chavez, R-Marrietta said after the hearing, “is they’re absolutely willing to pay for everything that they use.”
“They said it’s up to us to figure out how we allocate that, and it’s a very difficult calculus,” the committee’s Senate co-chair went on, “but I heard them say they are going to pay for it,”
The committee’s Ohio House co-chair, state Rep. Adam Holmes, R-Nashport, chimed in that it’s a question of determining “cost causation.”
“We just want to be fair,” Holmes said. “But it’s a demand of society as we grow, so just being fair on who pays for it.”
None of the speakers who addressed lawmakers Wednesday took a particularly oppositional stance to data centers. Instead, they said Ohio should welcome the industry, even if lawmakers should create guardrails to protect consumers.
Power impacts
Data centers place massive demands on the power grid and that demand will only grow over the next several years. The data center industry insists that it is ready and willing to pay for the new infrastructure necessary for its roll out.
Ohio state Sen. Shane Wilkin, R-Hillsboro, pressed Diorio on that point.
“So, does that mean data centers are going to cover that cost of the increase in the need for utilities for them specifically?” he asked.
“Yes, data centers are fully committed to paying our whole cost,” Diorio replied. “So, all the costs attributed to us, data centers are committed to paying.”
Ohio Consumers’ Counsel Maureen Willis said the central question facing lawmakers is how to encourage data center growth while protecting ratepayers from subsidizing that expansion.
“Ohio can and should do both,” she said. “We can welcome investment, we can support innovation, we can compete for economic growth, but we must also protect Ohio families that are already struggling with rising utility bills, and that balance matters.”
The problem, however, is that assigning costs to a specific customer class can be difficult. The cost of a new transmission line is relatively straightforward, but incremental increases in cost of power? That’s harder to parse.
Asim Haque from the regional grid operator PJM explained that in some states, utility regulators have begun to develop separate customer classes for data centers.
Public Utility Commission of Ohio Chair Jenifer French explained that’s exactly what Ohio regulators are weighing right now.
“They are not currently in their own class,” French said. “So we have communicated to the Ohio utilities and stakeholders that we will be evaluating how costs are allocated across the different customer classes, with the main goal again of ensuring that existing and future data centers are being properly allocated their share of FERC-approved transmission costs.”
But this also comes with a challenge, Haque told lawmakers.
“The challenge is, is that it takes a year or two to construct a data center, and it takes to be generous four to seven years to construct the corresponding supply.”
That means even with data center operators committing to cover their costs, there’s still a potential mismatch in supply and demand. Haque explained that, in the short term, PJM’s reserve margin of power will get “chewed up” by data centers and other power users, and that consumption might outpace the grid’s ability to replace it.
“There may be periods of strain on the grid,” he said, “where we are going to have to ask the data centers to effectively get off the grid and move to their backups, so as to not have to shed likely residential consumers.”
The environment
One of the biggest environmental concerns about data centers is their demand for water to cool their servers. But Diorio said data centers aren’t actually using that much water.
“Data centers are amongst the most efficient water users within the economy,” he claimed.
The 39 billion gallons the industry used in 2025 is less than the 59 billion gallons used by the semiconductor industry, and it pales in comparison to the 533 billion gallons used by the food and beverage industry, he said. Not to mention, he added, “the 2,500 billion gallons of water per year that were lost to water leaks in municipal water systems on an annual basis.”
But the scope of data center water usage in Ohio is at best murky.
Mary Mertz, who heads up the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, explained that her agency regulates the quantity of water in the state. The agency requires registration and licensing from high-capacity water users, but has no real ability to identify data center specific use.
“If you tie into a public water system, you do not register separately,” she said, “and all of Ohio’s data centers currently tie into a public water system, so there are no separate registrations for data centers. So, that is just something we do not have visibility into their actual water use.”
She explained the agency has seen rising demand from public systems with nearby data centers, but they’re unable to quantify how much of that increase is tied to the data centers themselves.
John Logue from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency explained that most data centers don’t have to get a wastewater permit because they’re connected to a municipal water treatment system. If they discharge to a river or stream, however, the data center would need a permit for limiting and monitoring pollutants.
“Ohio EPA has only issued one such (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) permit for a data center at this time,” Logue said.
What’s next?
Committee co-chair Chavez laid out four further committee hearings in the coming weeks.
He warned the schedule could change, but lawmakers plan to take public comment June 1.
Following that, the committee plans to hold hearings for testimony from data center operators on June 4, local government officials on June 8, and companies associated with the data center industry on June 11.
