In FERN’s latest story, produced with Switchyard Magazine, reporter Mya Frazier explores the damage—physical, economic, and emotional—done to Ohio’s rural communities by the explosion of data centers and the electricity generation needed to power those centers.
Frazier writes:
“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 Dec. 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.’”