The Data Center's Power Bill Lands on Everyone Else's Meter

Every electric bill in PJM's 13-state footprint — from Ohio to New Jersey to Virginia — is quietly financing a machine most customers will never see the inside of.▸ PJM's own market watchdog has now put a number on it: the capacity auctions that set what every utility pays for future power supply got billions of dollars more expensive specifically because of data-center load, and the price shows up in retail rates regardless of who's using the electricity. Ohio, the state at the center of the buildout, is running the money and the jobs sides of that story through two different agencies — and they tell opposite stories.

PJM's own 2026 Load Forecast Report projects summer peak demand across its 13-state grid climbing from 156,373 MW to 222,106 MW by 2036 — a 65,733 MW increase over ten years, with net energy load growing 5.3% a year, and the report names "growth in data center load" as the driver behind the upward revision in a dozen utility zones, AEP and Dominion among them.▸ Nationally, data centers used 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023 — 4.4% of everything the country consumed — and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projects that could reach 325 to 580 TWh by 2028, or 6.7% to 12% of total US electricity.

That growth has a price tag, and PJM's Independent Market Monitor put an exact figure on it.▸ Isolating data-center load from every other factor in its two most recent capacity auctions, the Monitor found that data-center demand alone added $7,271,197,971 — an 82.1% increase — to the 2026/2027 Base Residual Auction, and $6,497,653,512 — a 65.5% increase — to the 2027/2028 auction. Across the 2025/26, 2026/27, and 2027/28 auctions combined, the Monitor's report states the total increase in capacity-market revenue attributable to data-center load at $23,100,955,341 — money that flows through to every load-serving utility's costs, and from there into retail bills across the region, whether or not a given customer lives anywhere near a server farm.

Ohio — ground zero for the buildout, with more than 40 data centers now clustered around New Albany — became the first state to write a data-center-specific rate class in response.▸ Under Case No. 24-508-EL-ATA, ordered by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio on July 9, 2025, any new load over 25,000 kW (25 MW) that AEP Ohio serves must sign a contract of at least 12 years — a 4-year ramp period plus a mandatory 8 more — and pay for a minimum of 85% of its contracted capacity every month, whether it uses the power or not. Exit early after the ramp period and the customer owes an exit fee equal to three more years of those minimum charges. The Ohio Consumers' Counsel, the state's residential ratepayer advocate, backed the deal on the theory that "residential utility customers should not have to subsidize the utility investment needed to serve" data centers — an admission, built into the settlement itself, that without a take-or-pay floor like this one, the cost of building out the grid for data centers lands on everyone else's meter by default.

None of that $23.1 billion bought many jobs.▸ The clearest look at the trade is Ohio's own Tax Credit Authority, the five-member board that approves the state's job-creation tax incentives one project at a time, in public minutes, at monthly meetings. On June 1, 2026, the board approved eight deals in a single session — one of them a data-center exemption. The Ohio Department of Development's official minutes record every job commitment the same way: Cologix, Inc. got a 50%, 10-year data-center tax exemption for a project spanning Delaware and Licking counties, in exchange for a commitment to create 90 full-time jobs generating $10 million in new annual payroll. That same morning, the board also approved a standard job-creation credit for OPmobility Exterior USA, an auto-parts plant in Rossford, in exchange for 541 jobs — six times as many, for a smaller 12-year, 1.968% award, not a 50% exemption.

The gap isn't an accounting error — it's what a data center is.▸ A warehouse full of servers needs power, cooling, and fiber; it doesn't need a factory floor of people to run it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages counted 485,316 people employed nationally in data processing, hosting, and related services (NAICS 518210) as of the third quarter of 2024 — a real, sizeable industry, built mostly on the operations and construction side, not on the individual project-level FTE counts state incentive boards negotiate. Those project-level numbers are what show up in the ledger next to the megawatts, and in Ohio's ledger, the ratio doesn't favor the data center.

PJM figures cover the capacity auctions named in the source report; 2025/2026-auction-alone figures are not broken out separately from the combined three-auction total in the Monitor's report. Ohio Tax Credit Authority figures are each company's own committed new jobs and payroll as recorded in the June 1, 2026 minutes and are not adjusted for project size, capital investment, or megawatts, none of which the minutes disclose.