Ohio Power Company

In addition to that, there's another 1.9 gigawatts of capacity under construction.

Now, to prepare for future grid demands, Central Ohio's utility company, AEP Ohio, conducted a study to understand future demands on its electrical grid from data centers.

And as of early 2026, the number of expected requests, the number of requests that have been made, totaled 17.9 gigawatts.

And this is of anticipated incremental load capacity, so over 10 times what's currently in place.

The parties are PJM, AEP Ohio Transmission, and 3SB Energy Affiliates.

The first 800-megawatt phase is already served under Ohio Power's data center tariff, and the filing names OpenAI as the tenant.

Pike County came up here October 4th with OpenAI's 20-year, 8-gigawatt Ohio lease.

And the generation never enters the interconnection queue.

Start with the PJM SoftBank filing.

On October 13th, PJM asked FERC for permission to study how it would connect a roughly 10 gigawatt SoftBank AI data center complex in Ohio paired with 10.2 gigawatts of new on-site gas generation and three new 765 kilovolt transmission lines that AEP Ohio would build.

The filing uses the state agreement approach, a framework that lets a single state sponsor and fund transmission build-outs outside the normal regional cost-sharing process.

Critically, it does not resolve who pays for the new transmission and generation.

That deferral is the design choice worth flagging.

An initial 800 megawatts would be served under an AEP Ohio data center tariff, with the remaining 9.6 gigawatts of load and 10.2 gigawatts of generation phasing in through 2032 at the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment site in Pike County.

Western utilities tracking large load interconnection reform need to understand this framework before similar structures surface in CAISO, SPP West, or bilateral Bonneville Power Administration service questions.

Because deferring cost allocation is not a neutral technical choice.

And Ohio is already halfway there.

State regulators approved a rule for AEP Ohio that makes data centers pay for the new grid they need with an exit fee if they walk away.

And Ramaswamy himself already says build them out on old industrial land, not farmland.

I mean, the guy's got almost every piece sitting right there on his desk.

It is rather like widening the bridge before discovering that the new business needs only a small part of the promised crossing.

In July 2025, Ohio's utility regulator approved new arrangements for AEP Ohio's large new data center customers.

These included minimum payments linked to committed electricity demand, financial assurances, and charges for leaving early.

For the largest covered customers, the minimum billing requirement was tied to eighty-five percent of their contracted demand, even when actual use was lower.