This article first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal
Last March during the hearings on Ohio House Bill 15, I was the only representative of an environmental organization in Ohio to testify against it.
The reason? It gave the Ohio Power Siting Board just 45 days to consider a major utility facility – defined as 50 MW or more – to serve a large energy user – often a data center – on property owned by the applicant. Usually this process takes one to three years.
Data centers use prodigious amounts of energy – often as much as an entire city. If they are to be directly served by an energy generation facility, it needs to be well over 50 MW.
It was clear from the language of H.B. 15 that any such major utility facility would be run by gas.
Wind turbines have too large of a setback requirement to go on most land next to a large energy user, and the footprint of utility scale solar projects is too large.
