Power failure

I had driven for an hour through a landscape blasted by extreme heat and drought before I saw a single combine at harvest. It kicked up a thick dust cloud that coated my windshield, and from then on, it was like watching some dystopian film looping on fast-forward inside the frame of my car window. The monotonous succession of stricken row crops flashed by. It had been a brutal harvest for Ohio’s farmers. The corn, the soybeans, the wheat fields, all rust-colored, almost Mars-like in hue. There were no green fields. Corn yields cut by almost half. Disaster declared across the state. According to official agricultural maps, I wasn’t even in the worst of it yet: a moderate drought (light brown) zone lay ahead. It was hard to imagine worse—extreme drought (bright red) or exceptional drought (a deep brick red). 

I pulled over and stepped out. The air felt indistinguishable from a summer day, with temperatures in the high 80s. It was October, which one could say made no sense, if it weren’t just the way things are now. I walked beyond the rocky berm and stood in a patch of brown grass, directly underneath a high-voltage power line. It was held up by a soaring mass of steel, a transmission tower, its base thick and wide as an old oak tree. The route of the lines went north across more withered fields to the horizon line. I listened hard and long, and in the brief silences when no cars drove past, I finally heard it: a rapid succession of intermittent crackling. It started then stopped. Started again. Sometimes the crackling merged with an otherworldly vibration. I stood in blinkered awe: the lines really did hum. These two discordant sounds—the crackle and the hum—morphed into something more spectral. The wind picked up, and for the briefest of moments, my entire body felt electrified, as if some inescapable force had surrounded me. 

I only later learned that I was likely standing in a corona discharge. A phenomenon that’s hard to put into plain language: a kind of disturbance, yes, and of the kind power companies don’t exactly bring to our attention. The definitions I read, all too long and too technical to repeat, don’t really capture the phenomenon. What’s worth knowing is: the crackle and hum are a symptom of a failure. Not all power makes it to its destination. There’s always a discharge of some sort. Losses, by most estimates, run as high as five percent of power transmitted within the US grid system. These discharges sometimes happen when the air surrounding a high-voltage line is unstable: it’s hot, too dry, or blustery. The energy thrown off has nowhere to go. The air itself becomes a conductor. In effect, the line becomes more powerful than what exists around it. A corona discharge is, in a word, an imbalance.

I was searching for power lines, because I wanted to make sense of another kind of imbalance within the landscape of central Ohio: that between corporate control and ordinary people; between economic development and nature; and, most acutely in a season of drought, between electricity-hungry data centers and something as necessary for human survival as a field of crops. That’s what brought me to this roadside in Sunbury, a once quiet farming village founded as a stagecoach stop in the early 1800s, nearly at the bullseye center of Ohio. This was the starting place for two proposed 13-mile high-voltage transmission line corridors to be built by American Electric Power Ohio, the state’s largest utility. The lines would start just south of Sunbury at a sprawling substation and then traverse a stretch of farming tracts and country homes within a rural township until they reached two substations northeast of New Albany. The 150-foot-wide corridors, with towers equally tall, connect two cities radically divergent in fortune and political influence, another kind of imbalance. Where Sunbury has a median household income of about $92,000, New Albany is the wealthiest city in Ohio, with a median household income of nearly $225,000. 

New Albany is also the epicenter of Ohio’s data center boom, and a city effectively controlled by Ohio’s richest man: Les Wexner, the retail billionaire behind Victoria’s Secret, who according to Forbes, recently netted an $800 million windfall by investing in an artificial intelligence data center. The two new lines, once completed, will also power a cluster of Amazon data centers in New Albany and a massive new factory being built by Intel, lured to Ohio by $2 billion in state incentives. Recently, Amazon and Intel signed a deal with each other—after securing a $3 billion grant from the US government—to make chips for the military. And on December 16, Amazon said it plans to invest another $10 billion in new data centers in Ohio by the end of 2030.

Stuck in the middle of these two cities is Harlem Township, a rural farming community, where the loss of land and the consequent shift in the psychological landscape would be felt most intensely. At public meetings with township trustees about how to keep the community intact and maintain its “rural-centric” character, a sense of powerlessness was pervasive. “We got Les Wexner out there letting everybody else come in. AEP’s throwing these big tower poles in our front yards,” one resident complained. “Put one in Les’s backyard see how he likes it. Run a gas line through his backyard, see how he likes it.”

Other locals submitted comment letters to the state’s regulatory body charged with approving the lines. They worried about losing their unobstructed views of fields and forests. Some had moved away from cities specifically to escape the snarl of overhead lines. Adam and Beth Franz bought land in Harlem Township and built their dream home, only to discover that their property will now be crossed by the lines. Some commenters’ families had been on their land for generations. They worried about damage to their farms, to drainage tiles and crop yields. “The needs of our corporate neighbors to the East should not be the only consideration here,” wrote Amelia Smith. Ron Van Winkle worried about the creek on his property and the utility’s plans to “remove trees that presently hold our creek bank intact.” Sarah and Shaun Collignon, who live on five acres, were too far from the lines to receive any compensation, but not far enough that the lines wouldn’t destroy the peaceful sanctuary they’d built for their three young children: the garden at the edge of the property, the chickens roaming freely in the yard, a tree house built by grandpa, the unobstructed view of sky and fields, the garden where the children “gather blackberries in the summer, run with the dog, find interesting insects, play in the leaves.”

Despite these complaints, construction of the lines is moving ahead, no matter the cost. Many locals have already been bought out in private negotiations for easements, although only for those with lines and towers directly on their land. Those living adjacent get nothing. Meanwhile, the cost of land has soared. In Ohio, the average value was $8,040 an acre last year, according to the USDA. But in Central Ohio, a farmer recently sold 227 acres of farmland to Microsoft for $29 million. Who could say no? With those left behind, slammed with higher tax burdens. It wouldn’t be accurate to even call it a battle. More a full-scale appropriation of place. There was too much at stake. And no chance of a David versus Goliath ending in such a scenario. 

When I first started following this story, I thought I would walk the transmission routes. Maybe then I could understand the impact of data centers on the landscape of my home state, where I grew up and still live, and how they were changing other places. But when I looked south along the transmission route, across the road from where I’d pulled over, I saw a fenced-off field, fallow and desolate, a NO TRESPASSING sign hammered to an old wooden post. The lines dipped and followed the slight rise and fall of the land to the southern horizon line. There was no way to even glimpse the scale of what was being lost, what was being taken.

Data centers, in the plainest terms, are nothing more than buildings—gleaming windowless monstrosities but just buildings. The danger comes from what’s inside. Computers, servers, data storage drives, network equipment and communication connections, and everything else needed to prop up the fragile infrastructure of our rapacious tech boom. In Ohio, many of those data centers service Amazon, which defines the need for such a site bluntly: “It is the physical facility that stores any company’s digital data.” Because that data, for an online juggernaut like Amazon, essentially is the company, they protect it with redundancies and backup systems, with air conditioning and water cooling and fire suppression systems, and physical security measures wired to surveillance and alarm systems. Every bit of it demands more and more electricity, amping up demand for fossil fuels, and it requires astounding amounts of water—a large data center can require as much as five million gallons of water a day.

And with the rise of crypto mining and artificial intelligence, that usage continues to climb. Ohio has more than a hundred data centers now. Amazon, Meta, Google, they’re all here and all expanding, and Microsoft is coming next. Attracted by hundreds of millions in tax breaks, now they’re pressing for more. Much of that growth was sold as economic salve, with Ohio an easy mark, reeling as it was from the loss of nearly half a million manufacturing jobs during the Great Recession; the giveaways justified with the promise of reviving communities, despite the fact that most data centers are being built in the state’s richest city, and they offer few jobs, and when they do, they are mostly low-paying, contract security jobs. It wasn’t just the tax breaks. Massive sweetheart deals for cheap electricity, still undisclosed, were hashed out with a public utility commission captured by industry, with no mandate to safeguard against broader disaster, no concern for our shared future.

All told, the power needs of Ohio’s data centers are already staggering, but the near future is hard to even imagine. By 2030, in Central Ohio alone, demand will skyrocket to more than 5,000 megawatts—roughly equivalent to the power consumption of all of New York City. That power must be delivered to those facilities somehow. And so along with the data centers, miles and miles of new high-voltage transmission lines are needed in the state. AEP has chosen distressed farms and politically weak rural communities as sites to clear paths for more transmission lines, and for good reason: these communities have the least influence to resist such encroachment.

This expansion of the electric grid and demand for power comes at a moment when the consensus among scientists is dire at best. We’re a mere decade from a point of no return if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate catastrophe. If we fail to recognize the stakes, our generation will have to answer the hard questions of history. How did we become so oblivious to our own peril? Our oceans are rising and acidifying, our forests burning, our rivers flooding, our ice caps melting, our soil degrading, our harvests scorched by drought. How did we allow ourselves to be gripped by this collective death drive? 

Instead, we’re doing the most destructive thing imaginable: transforming the landscape irrevocably, adding at an astonishing clip to the estimated 11,000 energy-and-water-hungry data centers already in operation globally. With thousands more planned. Whether we fully recognize the consequences or not, we’re giving in to corporate America’s thirst for power and callous indifference to environmental cataclysm.

It’s unlike anything that has come before. For seven decades, the balance between economic growth and the power requirements to sustain that growth followed divergent trend lines. We had steady growth while our power needs remained mostly flat. In the 2010s, for example, the US economy expanded by a cumulative 24 percent, but electricity demand remained unchanged, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. That balance is now being radically upended. And the unprecedented energy demands of artificial intelligence represent a potentially calamitous divergence. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said the electricity usage of data centers worldwide might double in just four years. US electricity demand alone could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven mostly by AI, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.

By 2050, the global electricity demand for AI and data center will be nine times higher, at 4,500 trillion-watt hours of electricity. That’s up from only 500 trillion-watt hours last year. A figure impossible to wrap your head around. “I’ll see if I can get some perspective, but it is a very large amount,” wrote Mark Thomton from Wood Mackenzie, when I asked for some way to translate the unit of measurement into something more comprehensible. He emailed back, within the hour, apparently stumped. “Unfortunately, we don’t have an easy way for you to conceptualize it.”

But one part is possible to visualize: the lines. Electricity flows through thousands and thousands of miles of high-voltage lines within the US grid—an astonishing 150,000 miles of transmission corridors, enough to circle the equator six times. These corridors are the backbone of industrial development. It’s been called the largest machine on Earth, a marvel of engineering. But it also has, cumulatively, released more heat-trapping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than any other machine on earth. This machine is getting bigger, much bigger, both in Ohio, and across the country—but for whom? 

As the body’s vascular system circulates blood, transmission lines carry power across great distances, most of which is still derived from burned coal, fracked gas, and the potent hydrocarbons of methane. Their massive steel towers, as high as 180-feet, require wide corridors the size of football fields. After the mass clearing of trees and vegetation, vast swaths of rural countryside and farmland are rendered useless for much else. In this way, data centers are remaking the form and function of the American landscape as surely as the Erie Canal did or the Transcontinental Railroad. Second only to the Interstate Highway System, data centers are now the most visible and ubiquitous manifestation of raw political power in our country, and a physical representation of our nation’s enduring class divides.

There’s a certain banality to a data center within the landscape. They are void of any cultural significance, or aesthetic value, and inside they offer little in the way of space amenable to human habitation. In this way, data centers embody our existential alienation, a visual representation of the emptiness at the core of our impulsive material consumption. Nothing remotely awes in these spaces despite an outlay of treasure estimated in the trillions already. To think too hard on it, is to welcome a mood of loss over the extraordinary opportunity costs. A construction boom that in some alternate universe might have gone to building actual sustainable and technologically superior libraries, community spaces, cleaner farms, or even meeting basic human needs in the present: gardens and bike paths and sidewalks, or affordable homes.

The data center has only one possible ending: abandonment. Those giant windowless buildings will come to symbolize the post-agricultural landscape as surely as the worthless artifacts of our post-industrial age: the “ghost boxes” of shuttered Walmart superstores, the deserted shopping malls, the defunct Rust Belt factories. The knowledge locked up in data centers will be inaccessible to future generations, even if the forever chemicals used in their cooling systems will last, well, forever. We are told they will bring to us—in supporting the functions and computing power of AI—a magical transformation, but to what end? Bill Gates, in an inexplicable tautology during a recent interview with The Verge, argued the power needs of AI are an acceptable compromise, a net benefit, because AI might help us solve the climate crisis. Coal-powered solutions to eliminating coal. He also suggested that AI could answer questions in the new era of climate catastrophe, questions like: “How do you make steel? How do you make meat? What’s the weather going to be like?”

This is the new promise—there have been others—that the tech giants are going to save us. They say they are poised to become the largest purchasers of renewable energy in the US, propping up and providing mega-buyers for green initiatives. In shiny sustainability reports, they promise net-zero emissions. They promise to transform the US grid system. Instead, in recent years, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions increased 50 percent; Microsoft’s rose 29 percent; Meta’s jumped 66 percent. Such drastic rises expose the lies obscured by past promises: data centers don’t use green energy. Because they can’t. They must be connected directly to the grid. There’s too much at risk otherwise: the sun sets, the wind stops. And even if they buy offsets and renewables, that’s not the same. They cannot be islands. They must be tied up to the grid. They need high-voltage transmission lines. And in that way, big tech dictates the design of the future grid, which means more coal, more natural gas, more carbon emissions. The mad rush to secure power has become increasingly desperate: in Pennsylvania, Microsoft wants a 20-year agreement to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant; in Virginia, Amazon is pushing the state’s energy suppliers, including the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corporation, to slow their move away from coal-fired plants. For those who raise red flags, the tech industry points to concerns of the moment. We need data centers to uphold the speed of modern life. To drive economic growth. To beat the Chinese.

It’s another way in which the balance is off: between human and machine. Data centers are landscapes onto themselves—boxes built for the automation of entire sectors of the economy; stacks of servers, acres long and wide, inhumane in scale and aesthetics; sealed off, fenced-in for security, useless for anything but the empty act of simulacrum. They cannot grow food. They cannot house people. They cannot even sustain themselves for very long (the lifecycle of a server is less than five years). Like us, data centers can only consume—electricity, water, space. At most, they promise to drive the revolution that makes humanity obsolete.

As Amazon behaves in other sectors of the economy, so it behaves in energy markets. It stops at nothing, neglects no lever of influence or power, and in the end, gets what it wants. In Ohio, it has gained not only massive tax incentives but also deep, undisclosed discounts for its electricity—the power that powers its power. Deals unfolded with almost no transparency and even less public scrutiny and input. In the beginning, Amazon hid its identity, using a subsidiary, Vadata, to conduct private negotiations, even using code names, in correspondence with the state’s privatized economic development entity, JobsOhio, the region’s largest public utility, and state regulators. At any mention of concern, Amazon threatened to take its business to other states, and extracted price concessions, which the public still doesn’t know the value of nearly seven years later.

Some communities hoping for jobs and an economic lift offered free land where Amazon could build. There was little way, and no viable democratic process—public officials negotiated with Amazon in secret, shielded from the state’s sunshine laws—for residents or local officials, or school districts, in more economically strapped regions to question whether Ohio officials and regulators should give tax breaks and preferential electricity rates to a company with a market capitalization in the trillions to bring data centers to the state’s most affluent community. It was decided before locals could object, so they had no choice but to compete to get some piece of the proceeds rather than simply shouldering all the costs.

Consider that even today, retail customers of AEP Ohio are unaware how much their electric bills have inched higher because of its Amazon deal. Amazon claims such information is a “trade secret.” The combination of free handouts and little transparency has attracted other companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Meta, all of which also get undisclosed discounts on electricity—and all of which banded together in September 2024 to loudly oppose a payment suggested by AEP Ohio to cover the cost of expanding the electrical grid to support them. So everyone else in Ohio, including low-income residents who pay more of their monthly income on energy than affluent households, have been forced to absorb these rising costs to devastating effect: since 2021, AEP has shut off power to 496,368 households for unpaid bills—a number which seems certain to rise as rates for electricity rise. Meanwhile, the richest, most powerful companies in the world continue to get special, undisclosed deals for their electricity. And never hesitate to use their power to get more. In December, Amazon dangled the prospect of spending $10 billion more on data center’s in Ohio by the end of 2030, a bold negotiating tactic as it hashes out a new deal on its power costs with AEP. 

Ordinary Americans, in the language of energy policy wonks, are mere “ratepayers,” and the least influential actors in this opaque regulatory process. As such, they are the least likely to figure out some effective means of resistance, some way to stop this blatant gaming of the system. The process of utility ratemaking—deciding who pays how much for power and where new transmission lines get built—remains a byzantine, muddled process ruled by experts.

There’s an even more pernicious imbalance at work. The regulatory bodies charged with making sure that what you pay for your power is “fair, just, and reasonable for all consumers” have often, and quite easily, been co-opted by industry, or worse, succumbed to double-dealing and outright fraud. Consider that the largest bribery scandal in Ohio’s history involved utility ratemaking, a seemingly staid and uncorruptible process, which is saying something for a state that gave the world Jim Traficant, the Youngstown Congressman ousted for racketeering, bribery, and tax evasion. 

The shocking $65 million bribery scheme ended in early 2024 with Sam Randazzo, the former chair of Ohio’s public utility commission, which first approved the Amazon rate deals, found hanging from a rope in an empty warehouse, dead from suicide, as he was faced with a long jail sentence. That scandal—more than $1 billion was offloaded to ratepayers to bail out two failing nuclear power plants—toppled the speaker of Ohio’s Republican-controlled statehouse, Larry Householder. He now lives in a federal prison in Elkton, serving out a 20-year sentence.

These imbalances of power offer only grim conclusions. The lines from Sunbury to the two substations near New Albany will get built.

The lines will traverse 25 streams, according to environmental studies by the state.

The lines will clear-cut 55 acres of trees.

The lines will cross 47 wetlands and two ponds.

The lines will destroy habitat for the Indiana bat, the northern long-eared bat, the little brown bat, the tricolored bat, and the northern long-eared bat, all endangered or threatened.

It’s another imbalance: the bats need the trees, but the transmission lines need the land. The trees should be “saved wherever possible,” the state’s bureaucrats working for Ohio Department of Nature Resources (ODNR) noted, albeit without much conviction. “If tree removal is unavoidable,” they can still be cut.

The lines will cross within the range of the state-endangered northern harrier hawk, which prefers open habitats and hunts over grasslands. But in the language of officialdom, this hawk is not enough to stop the routes. There will be field inspections, sure. But if habitat is found, it’s not a game-stopper. The ODNR only recommends that “efforts shall be made to minimize impacts.”

The lines will be built. Amazon will use its power to get more power. 

Driving south on the gravel road of the Sunbury substation, I passed onto the idyllic, two-lane country roads of Harlem Township. I saw black cattle grazing in wide open fields and more burned-out row crops withered in the heat. There were silos next to tracts of five-acre homesteads with RVs and campers in long driveways. Trump flags flapping from flag poles. Murals of the former president on the sides of old wooden barns. Signs of his pending victory all around.

In the coming weeks, The Washington Post, now owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, would issue a craven and calculated non-endorsement of either presidential candidate. The move was another way of building Amazon’s extraordinary form of power. The company has billions in government and military contracts—and hopes to secure more under a second Trump administration. Amazon already safeguards top secret information for the CIA and for the US military; now, they’re hoping for an $8 billion contract with the Pentagon to modernize military servers and data centers. As the government’s dependency on intelligence-gathering and AI analysis grows, Amazon’s profitability is also growing inseparable from the powerful interests of the US military and the arms industry that sustains it.  

The morning after Trump’s election in early November, Bezos would take to Elon Musk’s platform X to offer a belated unofficial endorsement. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos wrote. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.” But such blatant flattery to secure one’s advantage was still weeks away as I neared the outskirts of New Albany.

I came first upon the thousand acres of the Intel campus, with its two chip factories in the throes of construction. The sprawling site had been rebranded by the state’s economic development boosters as the “Silicon Heartland.” It was surrounded by a wire fence and more NO TRESPASSING signs. A few dozen orange and white cranes towered above the site. Rather improbably, across the street, a farmer in a combine harvested a field of crops and kicked up more dust clouds. The field was adjacent to a newly built water tower, not yet operational, its massive tank, resting near the ground, not yet ready to play its role in providing the plant with the 5 million gallons of water it would need a day to operate. 

I drove on in search of Amazon’s data centers, clustered south of the development and far from New Albany’s residential enclaves with names like Asbury Ridge, Windsor, and Hampsted Green. The Amazon data centers might as well have been blank spots on the map. Their anonymity and uniformity unnerved me. There were no signs signifying what was what. It was like a miniaturized landscape of old medieval cities. Fortress-like black vertical steel fences with foreboding spear tips that weren’t ornamental, surrounded the perimeters of long, flat-roofed buildings larger than any shopping mall or airport hangar. I pulled into one entrance and stepped out. I felt watched and registered by round camera globes secured to building corners or protruding conspicuously from towering light poles. 

I drove on to New Albany’s downtown. At an upscale wine bar and restaurant, the bathrooms had bidets and heated toilet seats, and Sinatra piped in through a ceiling speaker. The perfectly coiffed women seated across from me slurped oysters and sipped Cava, while they debated the capital gains hit if the second home of one was sold in Santa Barbara. Outside on Main Street, there was no hint of the industrial world only five miles away. The sky above unobstructed. It was all clear blue all the way to the horizon line.