A company called Veolia is building a 350-megawatt power grid in New Albany to run one AI data center and nothing else. It has its own generation and battery storage, with no connection to the grid the rest of us use. Nobody's electric bill goes up because of it.
That answers a complaint people have made for a year — that data centers drive up power costs for everyone else. Here's a project that doesn't.
Watch how little that changes.
The same fight keeps turning up in one Ohio town after another, and the complaint changes with it. This was never about kilowatts.
Look at Grove City, where a charter amendment goes to voters in November. The city already stopped data centers with a moratorium. It didn't need an amendment. One came anyway, and the petition on file with the county board of elections calls the measure "facially neutral as to industry and commerce, applying solely to defined impact thresholds regardless of the industry or operator involved."
The findings name warehousing outright. The thresholds catch anything over 50 acres. Warehouses. Business parks. Housing. A hospital.
The word its backers use is democracy. Their filing says decisions of this magnitude "must be directly authorized by the residents most affected." Who could argue with that? Read the fine print, though.
The developer pays for the election. Which means there won't be many elections, because no company funds a public campaign against itself. Capital is mobile. A city is not. They'll build somewhere else, and Grove City will never know what it didn't get.
The tax base shrinks from there, and with it the money for schools, firefighters, police and paved streets.
Once the amendment passes, only a vote of the people can undo it. Council can't touch it.
And this language travels. It's carefully lawyered, built to survive a court fight, and written so it can be dropped into any charter with the names changed. Grove City is where it gets tested. If it holds, the next town gets the same text, and the town after that, in Ohio and then somewhere else.
There's an old Brady Bunch where Greg gets discovered, renamed, and handed a sparkly outfit. Then he finds out the studio can make anyone sound good in the booth. He'd been picked for one reason. He fit the suit.
The power bill fit the suit. New Albany just ripped out the back, so expect a new objection inside a week. Water, or noise, or traffic. Whatever fits.
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