Ohioans: Read the Energy Map, Not the Political Map
Ohioans: Read the Energy Map, Not the Political Map
A business perspective on getting Ohio’s data center policy right.
Read on SubstackOhio has roughly 200 data centers, about 120 of them around Columbus, and the load is arriving faster than the state can build for it. Richard A. Stoff, Senior Advisor of Leadership Now Project and the founding and former President and CEO of the Ohio Business Roundtable, argues the debate needs the discipline he built the Roundtable around: assemble the facts, run an independent analysis, then act together.
“Ohioans deserve real solutions based on an understanding of how these markets work, not promises that collapse under minimal interrogation.”
— Richard A. Stoff, Senior Advisor, Leadership Now Project
His central point is technical with broad consequences: transmission and distribution charges, roughly half a customer’s bill, are set across a utility’s entire service territory. A data center that raises system-wide costs raises bills from Columbus to Canton. He measures both candidates’ plans against that reality.
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Learn MoreRichard A. Stoff is Senior Advisor of Leadership Now Project and the founding and former President and CEO of the Ohio Business Roundtable. The opinions expressed in the op-ed are entirely his own, and references to the Ohio Business Roundtable should not be taken as its endorsement of those opinions.
