COLUMBUS — The Wall Street Journal editorial board didn't mince words this month, calling New York's one-year pause on large AI data centers "an act of monumental self-sabotage." Gov. Kathy Hochul says she's protecting New Yorkers from rising utility bills. Funny how that argument surfaced in an election year, right as polling showed voters souring on data centers.
Here's what the anti-data center crowd keeps saying: these facilities jack up electric bills, drain local water and power, and shouldn't get built without a public vote. None of that survives contact with the numbers. An Electric Power Research Institute study found data centers actually lowered residential rates between 2015 and 2024, because they spread the grid's fixed costs across more demand.
New York's real electricity problem is homemade — the state has shut down 4.4 gigawatts of reliable power since 2019 and replaced less than 3 gigawatts of it, mostly with renewables that don't run around the clock.
New York has run this play before. Its "temporary" 2008 fracking pause turned into a permanent ban by 2014, and upstate New York has been stuck in neutral ever since, while Pennsylvania kept drilling and kept adding jobs next door.
Maine almost fell into the same trap. Lawmakers passed a statewide data center moratorium in April. Gov. Janet Mills vetoed it — not because she disagreed with the concept, but because it would've killed a $550 million mill-town redevelopment project that had real local support. Even a governor sympathetic to the idea could see that a blanket ban takes out the good projects along with the bad.
Ohio doesn't need to speculate about where this leads. Grove City is already running the New York playbook, with a ballot campaign dressing up a routine zoning fight as a "power grab" and pushing decisions out of council chambers and into referendums. Ashland County, Sunbury, and Wilmington are close behind.
We just became CNBC's No. 1 state for business, largely on the strength of the same infrastructure that data centers need. Bad information is the fastest way to blow that lead.
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