Jeff McCallister

When big changes come very quickly, often with little or no information that’s easily accessible, neighbors tend to react with suspicion and sometimes even anger. Residents of towns like Trenton, in Butler County, and South Bloomfield, in Pickaway County, have crowded local zoning boards, signed petitions, and generally begun pushing back against data centers planned in those communities. In fact, at least 30 Ohio municipalities have enacted or are considering enacting moratoriums on new data centers.

And that raises a question: What’s the big deal?

“Safety is everything, something that can affect our lives every single day,” she told the crowd. “I definitely don’t like to do this kind of thing, but I will do it forever if it can keep one other family, one other person, from having to live what we live now.”

Pride and joy

Brandie’s oldest child, Blake Rodgers, was born March 25, 2000, and even before his first birthday, he had learned to climb steps and could even climb up onto furniture. As he grew up, he excelled at football and baseball and at being a big brother. 

If you watch, read, or listen to news outlets in Ohio, you’ve been bombarded for most of the past year about skyrocketing electricity rates. For most consumers, whether customers of an investor-owned utility or members of an electric cooperative, those stories likely were difficult to process. 

They are also super-sized users of electricity. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, data centers can consume as much as 50 times the energy per floor space as other types of commercial buildings. By themselves, each of those three centers near New Albany draws more power from the grid at any given moment than most of Ohio’s 24 local electric cooperatives draw at their peak. 

There was just one problem. Because of political red tape, the crew had to leave before they were able to “flip the switch” and energize the lines. 

Ohio’s cooperatives have sent line crews to Guatemala four times since 2016, each on a mission to bring electricity to places where previously there was none. The celebrations in La Soledad in 2016 and Las Tortugas in 2018 when lights came on for the first time are scenes none who were there will ever forget. 

Helene was the costliest — and one of the deadliest — storms ever to hit the United States. It came ashore in Florida in the overnight hours of Sept. 25, 2024, and dissipated only three days later near the Tennessee-Kentucky border. But in that short span, it had damaged hundreds of water and sewer systems, destroyed long stretches of entire roads, washed out countless bridges, and mangled or swept away hundreds of thousands of homes. 

The Tiffin-Seneca Economic Partnership (TSEP) and the Fostoria Economic Development Corporation (FEDC) have been active in finding ways to help the area beat some tilted economic odds — and Attica-based North Central Electric Cooperative has been working to be an important partner in those efforts. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. EPA had just issued a set of new regulations that Cardinal was unlikely to be able to meet, and while the Supreme Court eventually struck down those rules, more have followed. The polarization that has divided the American public on so many issues put a focus on electricity generation — while the rise of data centers, electric vehicles, and the like has driven demand for electricity to an all-time high. Interesting times (to say the least) for O’Loughlin and the co-ops. 

When the Ohio group reached the Carolinas, what they found was shocking. In the western parts of those two states, Helene had left a mutilated landscape in its wake. Roads, bridges, power systems — in some places, even entire villages — had been washed entirely off Appalachian hillsides and into flooded valleys. Damage was widespread, and it was devastating.